Words, Words, Words: Czech Language and Society Mirrored in Presidential Speeches

A talk by Václav Cvrček, PhD
Wed, March 11, 2015
at 6:30pm 
at Bohemian National Hall
321 E 73 St, New York City

Suggested donation: $5.00

In cooperation with the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York

Can future societal developments be detected in changing word patterns in presidential speeches? How can computational linguistics and national corpus help?

In his talk, Dr. Cvrček will explain the system and practical use of the national corpus, an extensive database of texts used for language analysis. He will present a case of the last Communist president of Czechoslovakia Gustav Husák and his speeches from 1975 until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Followed by a wine reception.

RSVP: newyork at svu2000.org

Václav Cvrček, Ph.D., is director of the Czech National Corpus Institute at Charles University (ČNK UK) in Prague, one of the most well-regarded centers for corpus-based language research in the world. His research focuses on corpus linguistics, grammar, quantitative linguistics and discourse analysis. His publications include the Grammar of Contemporary Czech (Mluvnice současné češtiny, 2010), the first corpus-based description of written as well as spoken Czech. He is also a co-lexicographer of several frequency dictionaries: Dictionary of Karel Čapek (2007), Dictionary of Bohumil Hrabal (2009) and the Totalitarian Dictionary of Czech (2010). Dr. Cvrček has been a Fulbright fellow at Brown University and is actively involved in international collaboration with US and European universities.