European Commission funds linguists' consortium

The Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics of the University of Tartu received funding from the European Commission through the Twinning instrument to launch the MEDAL (Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics) consortium project. MEDAL is an international consortium with an aim to develop and teach linguistic methodology. It was initiated by the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics.

In addition to the University of Tartu, MEDAL also includes top researchers from partner institutions: the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. MEDAL aims to develop the competences of all partners in linguistic methods, especially young researchers. It offers excellent opportunities to acquire new methodological knowledge, network and collaborate with researchers from other research institutions.

Every year, conferences and workshops take place in one of the partner institutions, focusing on one linguistic method: corpus linguistics, experimental methods, computer modeling, etc. The University of Tartu contributes to the consortium primarily with knowledge about corpus-based language research methods, as well as comparative linguistics.