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The official attempt to introduce the 'Czechoslovak language' as a common state language with two literary varieties, Czech and Slovak, influenced the overall concept of teaching the mother tongue, and its application in schools caused strained relations between Czech and Slovak secondary schools shortly after the birth of the Czechoslovak state. The first curricula for the teaching of the 'Czechoslovak...
This essay discusses several topics concerning the relations between language (linguistics) and music (musicology). The first section deals with the problems of the semiotic interpretation of music (instrumental and absolute) and finds that the difficulties in arriving at clear-cut solutions to them follow from the problematic and unclear status of the signatum of musical works. In the following section,...
This paper deals with structuralism, its roots, general principles and limitations. It follows the evolution of the main structuralist notions (structure, system) in Schleiermacher's and Humboldt's theories of language and tries to explain the causes of the Saussurean langue-parole dichotomy. It argues that the ambiguous Saussurean concept of the sign offers interpretations and theories of natural...
This paper recalls difficulties in the functional and social stratification of Czech and the codification of its literary norm. These difficulties make it necessary to discuss the possibility of a transition from the current post-purist viewpoint to a more realistic and liberal one. The point is to abandon the unavailing efforts at a sharp specification of 'literary' morphemic forms and to aim for...
This essay is a reaction to Roman Goettlicher's article Communication, Silence and Speech in Christianity (2003). It aims to show that Goettlicher does not provide just cause to deduce the insufficiency of natural language and the superiority of silence, as the article's concluding passages state. In addition, the article's indirect criticism of the Linguistic Turn and related appeal for a turn away...
The then-non-standard conviction of V. Mathesius - that science is an ongoing process of constructing truth and that human cognition represents a simplified reduction or epistemological stylization of experience - now appears to be in accordance with major present-day philosophical approaches. Mathesius' viewpoint followed primarily from his pronounced activist nature and self-reliant way of thinking,...
The word 'meaning' appears often in the work of Jan Mukarovsky. He does not, however, define this concept explicitly; thus we must deduce its content retrospectively, based on individual instances of its use. We then encounter a surprising ambiguity manifested even within a single text in literature studies. That is, when Mukarovsky describes the structure of a literary work, he refers to its three...
This article is a reaction to M. Komarek's essay Communication versus system? (1999) and is primarily concerned with the critical analysis of the dichotomic concept of natural language. In particular, the absence of empirical evidence for a language system (langue) is pointed out, which creates serious issues for the entire structuralist approach. That is, if it is impossible to have empirical experience...
ACzech literary theory and historiography face a task similar to that of Holenstein's uncovering of the link between Jakobson's linguistics and Husserl's phenomenology. Ties between the structuralism of Prague School literary theory and Husserl's phenomenology can be detected in the work of Jan Mukarovsky. They are suggested by the notions of reduction and essentiality; by transparency as well as...
The purpose of this article is to introduce three psycholinguistic models of speech production: the Levelt Model, the Interactive Activation Model of G. Dell and the Independent Network Model of A. Caramazza. The architecture of the models and the processes they assume are described and compared. The models differ both in the data on which their authors base their claims, and also in some crucial...
In many languages, existential sentences form a separate type, not only in a semantic sense, but also in their formal aspect (surrounded by a belt of transitional phenomena). In Indo-European, the verb *es- expressed the meaning of existence and was opposed to zero copula. As this verb attained the function of copula (e.g. in West European languages), in many cases the need for new means of earmarking...
The author agrees with the need to discuss the problems surrounding the functional stratification of contemporary Czech expressed in the article by F. Cermak, P. Sgall and P. Vybiral (2005). He requests that this discussion take place with maximum effort made to achieve theoretical precision, within a framework of possibilities without a priori ideologizing and in a truly dialogic manner. In this...
This article presents the findings of a detailed inquiry into syntactic constancy between English and Czech; the clause elements under discussion include the subject, object, adverbial and subject complement. The project assumes the general validity of the principle of end focus (basic distribution of communicative dynamism) as a superordinate factor with respect to syntactic structure. Since the...
This text is a methodological rather than a 'research-based' reaction to the article by F. Cermak, P. Sgall and P. Vybiral (2005). Its central topic is constituted by a detailed survey of individual statements in the article. In many cases, these statements are shown to be in conflict with empirical facts (mainly with corpus evidence) or, even worse, with each other. In the final section, the current...
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