Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics
Charles University, Czech Republic
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
CrossLing
Cross-Linguistic Analysis of the Internal Structure of Words
The aim of the project is to formulate principles for segmenting words into morphemes—the smallest meaningful linguistic units—and to apply these principles to dozens of natural languages with diverse morphological profiles. The research will proceed from the identification of minimal units (morphs) in authentic language data, through their assignment to morphemes, to the determination of the semantics of these units. By revealing the internal structure of words, whose current inaccessibility poses a major constraint on data-driven research in both theoretical and computational linguistics, the project will pave the way, among other things, for answering questions such as how languages express comparable meanings or how they incorporate loanwords into their vocabularies.
We are currently seeking candidates for a postdoctoral position within this project.