Peter Kosta

Peter Kosta (born September 20, 1955 in Prague ) is a German Slavist , Indo-Europeanist and professor of Slavic Linguistics at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the University of Potsdam , as well as editor of the Specimina philologiae Slavicae series .

Life

Peter Kosta was born as the son of the economist and publicist Jiří Kosta and the artist Helena Kosta (née Kohoutová) into a German-Jewish-Czech family. From 1962 Kosta attended a Czech elementary school in Prague until he emigrated to Frankfurt am Main via Vienna and Munich in 1968, together with his parents. From 1968 to 1969 he attended the JA Comenius-Gymnasium in Vienna and from 1970 to 1971 the Pestalozzi-Gymnasium in Munich. Arrived in Frankfurt am Main in 1971, Kosta completed his Abitur in 1976 with a great Latinum at the Goethe-Gymnasium .

After graduating from high school, Peter Kosta began studying Slavic Philology , Indo-European Linguistics, General Linguistics and Musicology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in the Faculty of Eastern and Non-European Linguistics and Cultural Studies. In 1981 Kosta graduated with his monograph “A Russian Cosmography from the 17th Century: A Linguistic Analysis with Text Edition and Facsimile” with a “very good”.

Since 1982 Peter Kosta has been a research assistant at the Institute for Phonetics, Indo-European Linguistics and Slavic Philology at the JW Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main with Werner Thomas. Peter Kosta received his doctorate in 1986. phil. “Summa cum laude” with the dissertation: Problems of Švejk translations in the West and South Slavic languages. Linguistic studies on the translation of literary texts . Doctoral supervisor was Gerd Freidhof . Between 1987 and 1992 Kosta worked as a university assistant at the Slavic Seminars in the Institutes for Phonetics, Indo-European Linguistics, and Slavic Philology. In 1992 he completed his habilitation with the habilitation thesis: "Empty categories in the northern Slavic languages: For the analysis of zero subjects and zero objects in the rule-binding theory".

His active language skills include Czech, German, Russian, English, French, Polish, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Lower Sorbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Italian, Bulgarian. In addition, there is the passive language skills of ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, ancient Irish, Tocharian and Lithuanian.

In September 1992 he received a C4 substitute professorship at the Chair for Slavic Linguistics and History of Language at the TU Dresden . From March 1993 to May 2005 he held the professorship for West Slavic Linguistics at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the University of Potsdam , which was renamed the Professorship for Slavic Linguistics in May 2005.

His research focuses on universals , language typology and formal syntax and semantics , language comparison , language contact and minority language research, language policy and political linguistics , conversation analysis , speech act theory , translation theory.

Peter Kosta has been invited to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Linguistics Department at Princeton University , New Jersey, twice as a visiting professor and visiting fellow . In 1999 he gave guest lectures at Harvard University and in 2012 he was invited to be a visiting professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago . Peter Kosta has been invited as a guest speaker at numerous universities abroad, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Bar-Ilan University in Israel, Uppsala University, University of East London, Cambridge University , Oxford University . Since 2011 he has been a member of the doctoral council of the Philosophical Faculty at the Palacký University in Olomouc , Czech Republic.

In 2013 Kosta was a member of the FP7 (Seventh Framework Program of the EU) large-scale project expert group of the European Commission on The multilingual challenge for the European Citizen . From 2014 to 2015 teaching and research activities at the chair for general linguistics at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Olomouc within the framework of the EU-funded project Lingvistická a lexikostatistická analýza ve spolupráci lingvistiky, matematiky, biologie a psychologie . In 2017, Professor Kosta was co-opted as the second editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages at Oxford University Press alongside Alan Timberlake (Columbia University) and is now leading the extensive project within the online project Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics (ed. Marc Aronoff).

Kosta was a reviewer for national and international institutions such as the German Research Foundation (DFG), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation , German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), National Science Foundation (USA), Swiss National Fund , Central Evaluation and Accreditation Agency (ZEvA) and several times for the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Publications (in selection)

A Russian cosmography from the 17th century. Linguistic analysis with text edition and facsimile . Sagner, Munich 1982.
Problems with Švejk translations in the West and South Slavic languages. Linguistic studies on the translation of literary texts , Sager, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-87690-353-X (= Specimina philologiae Slavicae , Supplement 13 - also dissertation at the University of Frankfurt am Main 1986 online )
Empty categories in the North Slavic languages. For the analysis of empty subjects and objects in the Rection-Binding-Theory , Frankfurt am Main 1992 (habilitation thesis).
(with Hans Dieter Zimmermann, Eckhard Thiele, Peter Demetz, Jiří Gruša, as co-editors) The Czech Library in 33 volumes . An initiative of the Robert Bosch Foundation. DVA Stuttgart, Munich: Czech Library 1999–2007.
(with Nadine Thielemann, as co-editor) Approaches to Slavic Interaction . John Benjamin, Amsterdam 2013.
(with Diego Gabriel Krivochen): Eliminating empty categories. A radically minimalist view on their ontology and justification . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2013.
Minimalism and Beyond: Radicalizing the interfaces. ed. by Peter Kosta, Steven L. Franks, Teodora Radeva-Bork and Lilia Schürcks. University of Potsdam / Indiana University, Bloomington [Language Faculty and Beyond, 11] John Benjamin: Amsterdam, Philadelphia 2014.
[Ed.] The Slavic Languages. An International Handbook of their Structure, their History and their Investigation . Vol. 1-2. Edited by Karl Gutschmidt (†), Sebastian Kempgen, Tilman Berger, Peter Kosta (Handbook of Linguistics and Communication Science 32.1–32.2). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton 2009, 2014.
[Co-Ed.] Informational Fundamentals of Life: Genes and Languages. Contributions to the Satellite Workshop in Olomouc, June, 26–29, 2014. In: Czech and Slovak Linguistic Review 2014 / 1–2. University of Olomouc.

Web links

Literature by and about Peter Kosta in the catalog of the German National Library

personal data
SURNAME	Kosta, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German Slavist
DATE OF BIRTH	20th September 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH	Prague