Department of General Linguistics
Research:
- natural language syntax, semantics and pragmatics and their applications in computational linguistics;
- separate research groups are working on spoken language and child language development;
- cognitive linguistics, using spatial expressions to express abstract relationships, grammatical meanings of verbs.
The Professor of Anthropological linguistics is supervising
- the empirical field study of the lexicon of different languages (e.g. basic color terms, smells, tastes, temperature, emotions);
- color term semiotics;
- the history and theory of language trees;
- in ethnolinguistics the focus is on the world-view of Estonian language (self, mind, soul, god, Taarapita), its different layers (Finno-Ugric, Baltic-Finnic, pre-Christian, Christian, German, Russian, Soviet) and its changes during critical periods (mainly during Christianization and the Crusades).
Teaching: BA, MA and PhD programmes for general linguistics and computer linguistics.
Research Group of Computational Linguistics