Sandor Janos Petőfi

Between 1955 and 1964, he taught in secondary schools in Debrecen and Budapest.

From 1964 to 1969 he was a member of the Computer Science Center and the Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 1969 he conducted research first at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and then at the University of Konstanz (Germany). In 1972 he was appointed professor at the University of Bielefeld (Germany). From 1989 until his retirement he was professor of philosophy of language at the University of Macerata (Italy).

His achievements are well characterized by the fact that his most complete bibliography to date, compiled in honor of his 80th birthday, contains many hundreds of articles, mostly published in leading international journals and publishers.

His connection with domestic scholarship was unbroken. After the change of regime, he became particularly involved in Hungarian text linguistic research both at home and abroad. He is an internationally renowned linguist, semiotician, and a pioneer of text linguistics and computational linguistics.

He was awarded honorary doctorates by the Janus Pannonius University (JPTE), the Kossuth Lajos University (KLTE), and the University of Turin. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences elected him an external member in 2007.