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.

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 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.

The present volume, originally prepared to celebrate Jan Firbas' 80th birthday, unfortunately is presented only belatedly, to commemorate one of the most outstanding personalities of functional and structural linguistics. Its contributors have been inspired by the richness and penetrating invention of Firbas, contained in his analysis of functional sentence perspective and of many other aspects of sentence and discourse.

Every grammar has to a greater or lesser extent a functional aspect. In this book, Bondarko provides a comprehensive discourse on the theoretical foundations of grammar, concentrating on functional-semantic fields, with emphasis on the diversity of their structural types. Criteria for distinguishing between linguistically structured meaning and non-linguistic cognitive content is developed in a discussion on “the Category of Aspect and its Environment” which includes an analysis of aspectual opposition according to the Prague School. Special attention is also paid to analysing polycentric fields and, specifically, taxis in the Russian language. The book is divided into three sections: Functional Grammar: Subject Matter and Goals — Structural Types of Functional-Semantic Fields — Categorial Situations. This book is intended for those interested in the general theory of linguistics.

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