INSTITUTE OF LINGUISTICS

Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb

Ivana Lucica 3, 10000 Zagreb, CROATIA
tel. (+385 1) 6120-011, 6120-142; fax. (+385 1) 6156-879
e-mail: zzl@ffzg.hr CROATIAN NATIONAL CORPUS

The Institute of linguistics is one of the organizational units of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb in Zagreb, Croatia.

The Institute is the center of most of the linguistic-oriented projects at the Facultyof Philosophy.

This document covers several topics on the Institute of linguistics:

History
Aims
Activities (projects, publications)
Staff

HISTORY

The Institute of Linguistics was founded in 1960 upon the suggestion of fivedistinguished professors of the Faculty of Philosophy (Mirko Deanovic, Rudolf Filipovic,Vladimir Gortan, Josip Hamm and Vojmir Vinja). The initial purpose of such an institutionwas to obtain more efficient organization of linguistic research at the Faculty. The firstdirector of the Institute was professor Ljudevit Jonke (1960-1963), followed by professorRudolf Filipovic (1963-1983), professor Milan Mogus (1983-1992), Dr. Maja Bratanic(1992-1994) and Dr. Vesna Muhvic-Dimanovski (1994.-).

AIMS

The general aims of the Institute defined from its beginning have been:

the development of linguistics and linguistic research methodology in the field of Croatian and other languages;
research of the phenomena in different fields of general and comparative linguistics of Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages;
the investigation of correspondences between Croatian and other languages.

ACTIVITIES

Projects

In the 1960-s the main activity of the Institute was predominantly oriented towardsCroatian in contact with other languages. In the 1970-s the project of compiling theCroatian language corpora started. An overview of projects (concluded and current) can bedivided in three areas:

Computer processing of the Croatian language
Contrastive projects (Croatian vs. other, primarily European, languages)
Current projects (Funded by Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of Croatia)

1. Computer processing of the Croatian language

Two areas of computational linguistics have been covered by projects:

Corpus compiling and processing:
1 million corpus of running text in Croatian (M-corpus) covering the 1937-1978 period
and compiled by Prof. Milan Mogus.
The corpus is divided in 5 sub-corpora (prose, poetry, drama, secondary school textbooks, newspapers; 200.000 tokens each)
The processing includes:
- alphabetic dictionary of types and lemmas
- frequency dictionary of types and lemmas
- concordances (KWIC) lemmatized as well as non-lemmatized
30 million corpus of running text in Croatian (see current projects)

see also: Croatian Corpus Processing: State-of-art and Perspectives doc ps pdf
Computational Morphology of Croatian
Computational model of the Croatian flective system
has been designed and prototyped. As the result of that research the

Morphological generator of Croatian word-forms has been developed.
At this moment (fall 1996) the filling of the lexicon is on its way. The result of generation will be list of word-forms accompanied with grammatical categories that can be used for semi-automatic lemmatization and corpus tagging.

2. Contrastive projects

The areas which are covered by Institute contrastive projects are:

Phraseological Dictionaries
of Croatian and 11 different languages (French, Slovene, Czech, Polish, German, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Latin, Greek, Modern Greek);
Languages in contact
the investigation of Anglicisms in several European languages;
Contrastive analysis
of Croatian and English, German, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian...

3. Current projects

COMPUTER PROCESSING OF THE CROATIAN LANGUAGE
The starting point for every linguistic research is the corpus. Today the investigation of the corpus of a language without the help of a computer seems to be hardly imaginable. Almost all world languages - but also the Slavic ones - base their linguistic and lexicographic studies on representative multimillion corpora of the respective languages. As for Croatian there has not been any corpus compiled according to the present experiences provided by coropus linguistics (except the pilot corpus of one million words of Croatian (M-corpus) compiled in this institution). The aim of the project is the compilation and processing of representative Croatian texts - both older and contemporary - in the form of systematically designed corpus. Particular goals are as follows:
1. to compile and process a multimillion (> 20 M) corpus of contemporary Croatian;
2. to bring selected texts and dictionaries of older Croatian authors as well as translations of the capital works of the civilization (Bible, Talmud, Kur’an) into the form of a corpus;
3. to make a supplement of the orthography dictionary on the basis of corpus processing;
4. to investigate on the basis of relevant corpora in diachronic and synchronic perspective the procedures in the formation of neologisms in the creation of Croatian terminologies;
5. to publish the corpora as well as the results of their processing on opto-magnetic (CD-ROM) and electronic medium (CARNET).
The method of compiling the material and processing the corpus has been tested on the pilot-research of the one-million corpus of Croatian worked on in this institution within the frame of a previous project financed by MZT (6-03-048). The influence of the project can be expected in the following areas:
1. Croatistics (history of the Croatian language, orthography problems, the development of Croatian terminology, the investigation of Croatian flexion and deriavation)
2. lexicography and lexicology (Croatian-Croatian and Croatian-foreign language dictionaries, text concordances, orthography dictionaries, thesauruses, terminology dictionaries, dictionaries of neologisms etc.);
3. information science (indexing and searching of textual data bases, processing of natural language, generating natural language massages, creation of computational tools for the processing of natural language texts).
SEMANTIC FIELDS AND SYNTAX
The main focus of this project would be to analyse the principles of semantic field organization and their prototypical syntactic determiners expressed primarily on the syntagmatic or sentence level. Thus the main aim will be to show how meaning and vocabulary organization connectand intermesh with syntactic phenomena. An analysis of this kind that brings together semantic and syntactic characteristics of parts of vocabulary of different languages, sheds light on the basiv principles of how natural languages function. The analysis would primarily be centered on semantic fileds in Croatian and English, but would also include data from non-Indoeuropean languages. Croatian and English represented languages belonging to different families of the Indoeuropean group, and by contrasting them differences can be determined, but at the same time principles that go beyond language specific analysis appear. Inclusion of data from non-Indoeuropean languages represents a way of confirming the basic principles, of semantic field organization, and it is expected that they will provide additional proof for universal principals, of how linguistic phenomena are manifested on the semantic and syntactic level. Previous work of the principal investigator on the prototypical organization of semantic fields, and the researchers theory of "Role and Reference Grammar" are starting points that in combination should provide the basis for a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of semantic an syntactic phenomena.
CROATIAN-GERMAN LINGUISTIC RELATIONS
The project will include both diachronic and synchronic levels of Croatian-German linguistic relations. On the diachronic level grammars, dictionaries and teaching books of German and written in German will be analyzed. German-language reviews, books and newspapers published in Croatia will be also dealt with. On the synchronic level the influence of the German language on 20th-century Croatian dialects will be investigated, decribed and analyzed. The social and institutional aspects of teaching German in Croatia between the 18th and 20th century will be investigated.
CONTRASTIVE GRAMMARS: CROATIAN AND FRENCH
The basic aim of the research is the elaboration of contrastive grammars of Croatian and French. The basic thesis of the project starts from the fact that there is no modern Croatian grammar with special reference to French grammar, nor any French grammar with special reference to Croatian. As far as the general theory of grammar is concerned there are different approaches which in principal do not enable the elaboration of a gramamr of a language. These grammars should contribute to the creation of a thorough grammatic theory and develop a general grammatic theory taking into account different models of grammatical description as well as modern linguistic methods. The result of the research would be the elaboration and publication of two grammars: the Croatian grammar with special reference to French and the French grammar with special reference to Croatian. This project would contribute to the introduction of Croatian into the world science, especially to its presence in the French language area. As the project will be using the results of computational linguistics and formal grammars, especially so called regular grammars, the project will contribute also to the development of general knowledge in this area, both in Croatia and in the world. The project plans the collaboration with Maurice Gross (Laboratoire d’automatique documentaire et linguistique - Université Paris VII et Paris VIII), with the Centre Lucien Tesniere (Université de Franche Compté - Besançon), with the Laboratoire de linguistique informatique (Université Paris XIII) and with Olivier Soutet (Sorbonne, Paris IV).

Publications

The Institute has developed a rather strong publishing activity which encompassesseveral series of publications such as:

Computer concordances of the texts of the (older) Croatian literature;
Contrastive studies of Croatian and other languages;
Phraseological dictionaries;
The English Element in European Languages series
Linguistic textbooks

More than 60 books and studies have been published as the result of the work on theInstitute projects.
The Institute is also co-publisher of the journal Suvremena lingvistika(Contemporary linguistics) which is quoted in the MLA and BL. It also publishes the Bulletinof the Institute of Linguistics where thorough bibliographical data as well asarticles on ongoing projects are published.

STAFF

1. Permanent

Vesna Muhvic-Dimanovski, Ph.D..
Ph.D. in contrastive linguistics; her field of interest: languages in contact, anglicismsin Croatian and German, research on neologisms in Croatian and other European languages;principal researcher of the project: Computational processing of the Croatian language

Marko Tadic, Ph.D.
Ph.D. in computational linguistics; field of interest: corpus linguistics, corporacompiling and processing, computational morphology

Ida Raffaelli, M.A.
M.A. in linguistics; field of interest: semantics in historical perspective, mediaevalFrench, chronicles

Marica Cilas
B.A. in Croatian language and literature; field of interest: Croatian syntax

Bosko Bekavac
B.A. in linguistics and informational sciences; field of interest: computationallinguistics, corpus linguistics

2. Principal researchers of the Institute's current projects

Milena Zic-Fuchs, Ph.D.
Ph.D. in semantics, field of interest: cognitive linguistics, semantics, syntax; principalresearcher of the project: Semantic fields and syntax.

Zrinjka Glovacki-Bernardi, Ph.D.
Ph.D. in linguistics, field of interest: discourse analysis, languages in contact: Germanand Croatian; principal researcher of the project: Croatian-German linguisticrelations.

Professor Dubravka Sesar
Ph.D. in linguistics, field of interest: Slavic languages, language standardizationprocesses, Czech and Slovak; principal researcher of the project: The analysis ofWest-Slavic languages.

Professor Miro Kacic
Ph.D. in linguistics, field of interest: theoretical linguistics, mathematicallinguistics, NLP, Croatian and French; principal researcher of the project: Descriptivegrammar of the French with special reference to Croatian.

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Last change 1997-10-07 by Marko Tadic