About the Institute

Major Research Areas

The Institute of Czech Language and Theory of Communication provides instruction in Czech (Bohemian) Studies. The major research area is the study of Czech language within an interdisciplinary context, which involves several priority orientations followed by the Institute, namely synchronic and diachronic Czech studies approached from a structural, cognitive and functional point of view, analysis of text and discourse, language acquisition and languages in education, sociolinguistics, and the cultural history of Czech.

Profiling Projects

Among the internal research projects of the Faculty of Arts, one is being conducted directly at the ICLTC: Acquisition and Development of the Language and Communicative Competences by Citizens of the Czech Republic (principal investigator: Karel Šebesta). Members of the Institute participate in other FA projects: Society, Culture and Communication in the Bohemian history (principal investigator: Marie Koldinská), The Influence of the Group Variability Factors of the Czech language on the Perception of the Speaker’s Personality (principal investigator: Jan Volín), Rationality in the Humanities (principal investigator: Miroslav Petříček), and Literature and Art in Intercultural Relationships (principal investigator: Jan Wiendl).

Individual members of the academic staff also work on research projects in their own specializations and take part in national and international cooperation projects. At the moment, five projects of the Czech Science Foundation are being conducted at the ICLTC:

  1. The Correspondence of Karel Havlíček (GAČR P406/12/0691; Robert Adam)
  2. Preparation and Publication of the Inventory of the 17th and 18th Century Manuscripts from the Museum Collections in Bohemia III (GAČR P406/11/0782; Alena A. Fidlerová)
  3. Discourse Irony in Czech Cultural Context: the Developmental Correlates of Irony Understanding and Its Function in Adult Discourse (GAČR 407/12/0757; Eva Filippová)
  4. Sociolinguistic Analysis of Variation in the Use of Prothetic /v/ in Bohemia (GAČR 13-12973P; Jan Chromý)
  5. Development of Social Cognition in Czech Deaf Signers (GAČR 15-09692S; Eva Filippová)

Major Publication Projects

The most significant publishing project of the Institute is the reviewed scientific journal Studie z aplikované lingvistiky / Studies in Applied Linguistics (SALi). The journal focuses on selected themes of applied linguistics, interdisciplinary fields of language description and related methodological questions. Besides specialized articles, it contains portraits of prominent linguists, translations essential and inspiring works reflecting the development of relevant linguistic disciplines, reviews of relevant publications and news from the field. Other important periodicals are proceedings of regularly held conferences – of the biennial Czech-Polish conference, co-organised with the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature and the University of Warsaw, and of the international graduate and postgraduate conference InterFaces, organised together with the University of Leipzig and the University of Wroclaw.

National and International Partner Institutions

The Institute cooperates both at professional and teaching levels with the Institute of the Czech Language of the Academy of Sciences of the CR. Since 2012, ICLTC participates in the Laboratory of Behavioral and Linguistic Studies (LABELS) which is a joint research center of the Faculty of Arts and the Institute of Psychology of the Academy of Sciences of the CR. In addition to the co-organisers of joint conferences mentioned below, important partners of the ICLTC include e.g. the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, where members of ICLTC staff teach regularly, or Humboldt-Univesität Berlin.

Major Conferences and Events

The Institute organises scientific and student conferences in cooperation with other institutions, e.g. the above mentioned Czech-Polish conference, taking place alternately in Prague and in Warsaw, or the international InterFaces conference for undergraduate and doctoral students, taking place alternately in Prague, Leipzig and Wroclaw. Important periodically held conferences, which have been recently co-organized by ICLTC, include the 9th Annual Conference of Slavic Cognitive Linguistics, held by The Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association (SCLA), or the 6th International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG-6), focusing on constructivist descriptions of language. Staff and doctoral students of the ICLTC co-organize the annual Summer School of Linguistics held in South Bohemia which brings together scholars from the Czech Republic and abroad and focuses on current trends in linguistics. The ICLTC students also organize Žďárek, a weekend student workshop held once a year which provides the participants with an opportunity to present the results of their research and discuss them with colleagues.

Úvod > About the Institute