AKSELA LAZAROVA LABORATORY OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS (LABLING) at Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen

1. About LABLING

LABLING was founded with the aim to provide a discussion forum and support the cooperation between researchers working in different fields of study, including corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, communication analysis, speech research (colloquial and child speech as norm and pathology), bilingualism, psycholinguistics, theory and practice of literary languages, political and media discourse. LABLING team involves scholars, university lecturers and doctoral students from different faculties of Shumen University, who are specialists in linguistics, computer studies, and speech therapy.

Our Laboratory works in close cooperation with the Institute of Information and communication Technologies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. We have contacts with the Commissions for Slavic literary languages and medialinguistics at the Slavists International committee. We have collaborated in several international projects with Zentrum fur Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin. The laboratory has a contract with the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Pathology, and Life Activities Advancement Center in Belgrade, Serbia. University students’ Linguistic Club was founded in 2019 as part of the Laboratory of Applied Linguistics. Each of its members works on their own research project. Projects' results are presented at national and international forums and publications.

The Laboratory regularly organises seminars and workshops which are given by prominent researchers from the Institute of Information and communication Technologies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and from Sofia University. We plan further cooperation with these institutions aimed at participating in various research projects in different areas of study.

The Laboratory took part in the following research projects:

  • 2002 – 2003: Tendencies in the Bulgarian language at the border of the two millennia;
  • 2002 – 2005: Syntaktische Konsequenzen des Morphologieerwerbs (ZAS – Berlin);
  • 2005: Studies of speech as norm and pathology;
  • 2006: “Erwerb und Disambiguirung intersententieller pronominaler Referenz” (ZAS – Berlin) unter der Leitung von Prof. Jurgen Weissenborn (Humboldt-Universitat Berlin) und Doz. Dr. habil. Dagmar Bittner (ZAS – Berlin)
  • 2012 – 2013: The language of the Bulgarians: an interdisciplinary perspective.
  • From October 2012 up until now: Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN), an international project initiated by the European union for creating a Bulgarian regional infrastructure included in the Charter of Bulgaria for scholarly research, led by assoc. prof. Kiril Dimov, PhD.
  • In 2018 we started CLaDA-BG – a national interdisciplinary research e-infrastructure for resources and technologies for studying Bulgarian language and cultural heritage. It is part of the framework of the European infrastructures CLARIN and DARIAH.
  • In 2022 – National Scientific Program "Development of Bulgarian Studies Abroad" (NNP BULGARIAN STUDIES)

In September 2014 LABLING was the main organiser of the IVth International Interdisciplinary Congress for early prevention and diagnosing of verbal communication problems in children, in partnership with the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Pathology, and Life Activities Advancement Center in Belgrade, Serbia, and the Greek Organisation for hearning and speech therapy and communication disorders in Patras, Greece. The forum was attended by 85 researchers from 8 countries who work in fields of study, including psychologists, pedagogists, speech therapists, linguists, medics, engineers, geneticists, etc, who took part in discussions on both theoretical and applied aspects of language and speech.

In the autumn of 2016 (from 6 to 9 September) LABLING organised and hosted the First International theoretical and applied conference entitled Language in the coordinates of massmedia. The event was organised together with the High School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Saint-Petersburg State University and the Commission for Medialinguistics with the International Committee of the Slavists. The conference was dedicated to the current state of affairs in the research of Slavic languages in massmedia. The participants included 170 researchers from 16 countries: Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Germany, Lithuania, Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Serbia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Finland and Czech Republic.

Members of LABLING are part of the organising committee of annual international forums, such as Cognitive Modeling in Linguistics (CML), Speech and Computer (SPECOM), Fundamental and Applied Aspects of Speech and Language (Belgrade, Serbia)..

2. Laboratory resources

The laboratory has at its disposal linguistic archives for onomastics, dialectology, colloquial speech, and child language. One the researchers’ primary aims is to increase the existing online corpora, and create new databases of linguistic resources.

In 2020-2022 the first Bulgarian children's speech corpus (BULGARIAN LABLING CORPUS – DOI:10.21415/PHWH-J834) has been published on the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) platform.

The laboratory is well equipped with computer technology, dictaphones, and software for speech processing.