The Prague School Of Structural And Functional Linguistics

The importance of the Prague School for the rise of structuralism and for integration of the theoretical linguistics of today can hardly be overestimated. The volume brings together 13 papers showing the main results of the research of the Prague School and of its continuation in the domains of phonemics and written language, morphemics and word formation, lexicon, syntax and semantics, text structures, stylistics and typology. The authors all actively contributed to the domain they are treating here.

This is the first English version of a text out of print for more than 40 years, summarising the positions and key concepts of an influential stream of linguistic thought. Using quotations as entries, J. Vachek (1909-1997), a leading advocate of the Prague School, employed more than 160 sources, papers and monographs, by well over 30 representatives of the school (Mathesius, Trnka, Skalička, Daneš, Dokulil, Mukařovský, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Isachenko, and others). The dictionary both captures the pioneering efforts and achievements of the school from its foundation in 1926, and provides a framework for assessing the current state of affairs, attesting to its originality and serving as a preventive to treading paths already explored. The headword concepts are provided with French, German and Czech equivalents and Vachek's original preface is supplemented by a foreword which traces the development of the school up to the present date and puts it into perspective.

Contains key papers by the founders of the Prague School; including Vilém Mathesius famous article “Functional Linguistics” (1929), the theses presented at the First Congress of Slavists in Prague (1929), an earlier paper by Mathesius “On the potentiality of the phenomena of language” (1911), Jan Mukarovský's “Standard language and poetic language” (1932) and other historical contributions by B. Havránek, V. Skalicka, and B. Trnka.

Volume 2 of the Prague Linguistic Circle Papers constitutes a single whole together with Vol. 1 of the series, reviving the classical series of Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague which was of great importance for the development of European structural linguistics in the 1930s. In the present volume, nine Czech linguists and eight authors from abroad present new ideas in various domains from basic properties of the system of language to discourse types and to history of linguistics in the 20th century. Fundamental issues of structural linguistics are discussed by C.H. van Schooneveld and F. Čermák, those of quantitative linguistics by M. Těšitelová, of sentence structure by H.-H. Lieb, Y. Tobin, J. Panevová, T. Gross and J. Šabršula, discourse patterns are dealt with by J. Hoffmannová, S. Čmejrková and F. Šticha, phonology and graphemics by E. Battistella, A. Svoboda and P.A. Luelsdorff with S.V. Chesnokov, and the lexicon by L. Waugh and V. Straková.

This volume is the first one of the revived series of "Travaux," which was the well-known international book series of the classical Prague Linguistic Circle, published in the years 1929-39. The tradition of the Circle still attracts attention in broad circles of European and American linguistics. The first volume of the new series is divided into five sections: 1. Introductory papers characterizing the development of the Prague School in the recent decades; 2. Methodological issues of structural and functional linguistics; 3. Sentence structure; 4. Discourse patterns; 5. Theory of literature. In accordance with the tradition, the volume contains contributions concerning issues of principle, empirical linguistic studies, and also papers from the theory of literature.

The first part of this volume discusses the importance of Prague Structuralism for contemporary linguistics: the phonology of N. S. Trubetzkoy, the concepts of sign and neutralization in the work of Bohumil Trnka, and his influence on the theory of functional sentence perspective. It also traces contemporary developments of structuralist methodologies in pragmatics, morphology, and lexicology. The second part focuses on the legacy of the Prague school in the theories of poetic function, rhetoric, and translation. It assesses the relevance of structuralism for the present thought of difference, social systems and history, system theories and fictions in science and literature. The book is the first volume in the series Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities.

The Prague Linguistic Circle came into being on the afternoon of October 6, 1926, when five Czech and Russian linguists gathered to hear a lecture by a German colleague. From this international beginning, the interests of the group grew to first encompass language in all its functional heterogeneity and then finally all of culture, which the Circle conceived of as a structure of sign systems. Semiotics was thus the overarching discipline for the Prague School, serving to organize all phenomena shared and exchanged by a cultural community. In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the importance of the Prague School, but writing about it has frequently been marred by misconceptions. The central aim of this volume is to correct those misconceptions and to present the diversity of interests within the Prague School—literary criticism, linguistics, theory of theater, folklore, and philosophy. These essays by Bogatyrëv, Jakobson, Karcevskij, Mukařovský, Rieger, Vodička, and Honzl are here translated into English for the first time. Some have a special historical value in illuminating critical stages of structuralist thinking; others reveal the timeliness of the School's contributions for the theoretical conflicts of our day. Each essay is accompanied by an informative introductory note, and the whole is followed by the editor's "Postscript," tracing the roots of structuralist aesthetics.