About the Seminar

The Seminar is a forum for exploring and discussing cutting-edge research in all areas of linguistics, including but not restricted to syntax, semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics and historical and computational linguistics. It provides a platform for getting acquainted with what current issues researchers from both abroad and the Czech Republic deal with in their investigations.

During the Seminar, which takes place every two weeks, talks from prominent established linguists as well as from junior researchers are given on topics of their contributions to the field followed by a discussion with the speaker. Faculty members are also in attendance and contribute to an exchange of ideas between the speaker and the students.

The Seminar is named in honour of Roman Jakobson, one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle, who became a professor at Masaryk University in 1933.

All are welcome! We usually go to dinner with our guest, if you would like to join, please contact one of the organisers. Also, if you would like to have a private meeting with the guest to discuss your or their research, we can help facilitate this.

Upcoming talks (Autumn Semester 2026)

24th of September: 

8th of October:

22nd of October

5th of November

3rd of December

17th of December

Past talks

Eva Wittenberg (Central European University, Austria): Complex structures over time: Extracting our mental models of events from language

Magdalena Roszkowski (Central European University, Austria): The acquisition of plural expressions

Radim Lacina (Masaryk University, Czech Republic): Not as negative as meets the ear: Negation illusions in Czech

Matthew Husband (University of Oxford, UK): Decomposing GEN: Quantification, modality, and the absence of generic articles

Jonathan Bobaljik (Harvard University, US): The Itelmen inclusive imperative: Composing clusivity

Mikuláš Preininger (Institute of Psychology CAS & Charles University, Czech Republic): How do we process masculine generics?

Christos Christopoulos (Masaryk University, Czech Republic): Derivational affixation in Distributed Morphology: The view from Modern Greek verbalizers

Éva Dékány (ELTE Hungarian Research Centre For Linguistics, Hungary): PPs mixing nominal and adpositional properties: In support of the binominal analysis

Markéta Ziková & Martin Březina (Masaryk University, Czech Republic): The evolution of trapped sonorants in Czech in the light of phonological universals

Yasutada Sudo (University College London, UK): Specific indefinites and dynamic presuppositions

Marcin Wągiel (Masaryk University, Czech Republic & University of Wrocław, Poland): The internal structure of linguistic representations of numbers

Magda Ševčíková (Charles University, Czech Republic): Verbs with foreign roots in Czech: A perspective on a universal of language contact

Anna Staňková (Charles University, Czech Republic): Prosodic encoding of information structure in Czech: A production experiment

Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University, Israel): Paradigm gaps, rational inference, and a condition on the use of forms

Edoardo Cavirani (Masaryk University, Czech Republic): Refining the internal structure of expressive binominal structures: A view from Italian

Viola Schmitt (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US) & Nina Haslinger (Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Germany): Scalar alternatives and decomposition

Organisers

Marcin Wągiel (marcin.wagiel@phil.muni.cz)

Radim Lacina (rlacina@mail.muni.cz)

For students

The Roman Jakobson Linguistic Seminar is available as a course at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University under the code CJJ64. If you're interested in coming, please consider signing up for it to get 2 credits. You need to attend the talks and write a one-page abstract of one of the talks attended at the end.