About CEFT

The Center for Experimental, Formal and Theoretical Linguistics conducts basic and applied research in linguistics. Our main focus is on formal generative linguistics (especially syntax and morphology), although our research also extends to other linguistic subdisciplines, from language acquisition and psycholinguistics to language technologies. We also engage in applied research, primarily in language policy and language pedagogy.

In addition to Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency-funded projects and externally-funded applied projects that members of our group are continuously involved in, we pursue our group research agenda in the scope of the Slovenian Research Agency-funded research program Theoretical and experimental linguistics (P6-0382, P.I. Franc Marušič).

Basic research topics of our group have recently included:

• research on theoretically relevant characteristics of various languages (e.g., grammar of clitics, status of syntactic islands, syntax of the noun phrase, left periphery, morphological multifunctionality, negation);
• analysis of theoretically relevant features of colloquial and dialectal varieties of Slovenian (e.g., clitic doubling, case-suffix doubling, competing agreement patterns);
• psycholinguistic research (e.g., experimental testing of linguistic models of the grammar of agreement, testing the correlation between general cognitive abilities and language through the prism of children’s acquisition of mathematical number and grammatical number)

Applied work and outreach activities of our group has recently included:

• participation in applied projects such as Development of Slovene in a Digital Environment, in the development of web portals such as SMejSe (Slovenian as a minority language);
• studies providing government bodies (e.g., the Ministry of Culture’s Department for Slovene Language) with support in the preparation of new regulations and language-policy measures by investigating the effects of current regulations on public language use, the efficiency of the principles of determination of domestic/foreign status in vocabulary, the language policy in higher education and science);
• language consulting services (e.g., JeSv consultancy within the EU-funded project JezikLingua);
• participation in linguistics/language-related consortia such as CLARIN.SI/Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure, Slovenia;
• organization of the public invited-lecture series Jezik & Linguistics Colloquia (coorganized with CCML)

Collaborations: Members of the group are closely connected with linguists and cognitive scientists from Slovenian and foreign research institutions (University College London, University of Graz, University of California, San Diego, University of Ljubljana, Slovene Research Institute (SLORI), etc.)

Teaching: Alongside their research endeavors, our members are also engaged pedagogically as instructors of various courses in the Slovene Studies track and the Slovene Language and Language Data track of the Language and Literature in the Digital World BA program and the Linguistics track of the Humanities Studies MA program of the University of Nova Gorica’s School of Humanities, as well as in the PhD-level program Cognitive Science of Language of the University of Nova Gorica’s Graduate School.