Life Anniversary of Petr Sgall , the Founder of PBML

The Editors of The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics wholeheartedly join the co-workers, former students and broader linguistic community to celebrate this year’s life anniversary of its founding Editor-in-Chief Professor PhDr. Petr Sgall, DrSc. Dr.h.c mult. (born May 27th, 1926). Petr Sgall is an outstanding member of the Czech linguistic community highly appreciated at home and abroad. His scientific interests are extremely broad: they range from Indoeuropean studies through topical issues of Czech grammar and language culture to theoretical and computational linguistics. He is the author of the original functionally oriented framework of formal description of grammar, called Functional Generative Description, which stands as an alternative to the Chomskyan concept of generative grammar. He is one of the founders of Czech(oslovak) computational linguistics, the high level of which he succeeded to retain even under the unfavourable conditions of the restrictive political regime of the past. He received international recognition as an elected member of the Academia Europaea and was elected a honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America. He has got two honorary doctorates, one by the Hamburg University and one by the French INALCO institute in Paris. To recall briefly some of his chief research interests, we reprint here the Introduction to a volume of Petr Sgall’s selected writings called Language in Its Multifarious Aspects published in 2006 by Karolinum Publishing House in Prague.