XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Vilem Mathesius was a Czechlinguist, literary historian and co-founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He is considered one of the founders of structural functionalism in linguistics.

During the beginning of his career, Mathesius's interests were split between literary history and linguistics.Hisworks, which cover the Anglo-Saxon period through the late Middle Ages, were foundational in establishing the Anglistics department at the university. He also wrote a number of articles on Shakespeare and his critics in 1916, the year of Shakespeare's Jubilee. Alongside his work with literature, he began exploring linguistic theory and questioning the Neogrammarian emphasis on diachronic, or historical, linguistics that defined the study of language at his time. In 1911 he presented one of his more famous lectures to the Royal Learned Society, “On the potentiality of the language phenomenon”, which anticipates Ferdinand de Saussure's critical distinction between langue and parole (1916) and emphasizes the importance of the synchronic (in his words, “static”) study of language.

Vilem Mathesius was the instigator of the Prague linguistic circle, and its first president until his death in 1945. The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle was an influential group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralism literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation during the years 1928–1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Cafe Derby in Prague, which is also where meetings took place during its first years. Besides, the circle included the Russian émigrés Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevskiy, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars Rene Wellek and Jan Mukarovsky.

The Circle achieved international notice at two linguistic conferences: the First International Congress of Linguists at Hague in 1928, then the First International Congress of Slavists in Prague in 1929.They used these conferences as an opportunity to develop and present a set of ten theses for linguistic research, promoting a “functionalist” approach to the study of language.

The Prague School has had a significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. Following the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the circle was disbanded in 1952, but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian — later Hallidean — linguistics).

Vilem Mathesius entered in the history of linguistics as one of the first researchers of the phenomenon of “topic-comment articulation”.The Mathesius's famous work on the so-called “topic-comment articulation” begins with the comparison of “topic-comment” and “formal” articulation. The first one finds the way how a sentence is put into context, while the latter decomposes the sentence into formal grammatical units.

To put a sentence into context, it is necessary to highlight the “starting point” — the information already known to the listener or reader, updated in the speech situation — and the “core of the statement”, that is, the new information reported in the sentence. In modern linguistics, the terms “theme” and “rheme” (in the English tradition often — “topic” and “comment”) usually correspond to the concepts of Mathesius “starting point” and “core of the situation”. The linguist drew his attention to the fact that topic-comment articulation determines the order of words in Czech: usually the starting point is at the beginning of the sentence, and the core of the statement is at the end. The reverse (“subjective”) order of words makes the core of the statement more special.

In the contrastive analysis of English and Czech Mathesius found that in the English language the topic-comment articulation is expressed by means of the voice. Thus, an English subject acts as an indicator of the starting point (theme), while in the Slavic languages its function is different because it expresses the agent.

The Czech linguist independently of de Saussure contrasted the synchronic and diachronic (in his terminology — “static” and “dynamic”) aspects of language and focused on the first of them in his article. At the same time, Mathesius emphasized that the term “static” cannot be understood literally: language constantly “fluctuates” within certain limits, and this “fluctuation” is a necessary condition for the subsequent development and change of language; thus, in the current state of the language, its subsequent states are potentially represented. These “fluctuations” develop some trends that, unlike the laws of physics, are not regular, but can be represented statistically. Thus, Mathesius was one of the first linguists to draw attention to the important role of statistics in the study of linguistic phenomena.

Vilem Mathesius made the great contributions to Linguistics of the twentieth century. Mathesius is memorialized at Charles University by the Vilem Mathesius Centre for Research and Education in Semiotics and Linguistics and by the Vilem Mathesius Foundation for the Promotion of English and American Studies in Prague, which issues annual awards for the best MA and BA theses in the Department of English and American Studies.

Список использованной литературы

Makaryk I. R. Semiotic poetics of the Prague School (Prague School). The Encyclopedia Or Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Sebeok, Th. Portraits of Linguists: A biographical source book for the History of Western Linguistics, 1746-1963 (vol 2). Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1967. 474–489 pp. 

Vachek J. The linguistic school of Prague: an introduction to its theory and practice. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1970. 137–151pp.

Oldrich L. Vilém Mathesius (1882–1945). Режим доступа: http://sas.ujc.cas.cz/archiv.php?lang=en&art=3624

VilémMathesiusAwards. Режим доступа: http://ualk.ff.cuni.cz/vilem-mathesius-award.html