The essays in this two-volume anthology provide the reader with an overview of current Czech, Polish and Hungarian research in language, literature and meaning as well as some new perspectives on the major theoretical contributions of Roman Ingarden, Georg Lukács and Jan Mukařovský. For the most part, the emphasis is on Poetics and Literary Theory; however, in some of the essays the focus shifts to such related disciplines as Aesthetics, Linguistics and Semiotics. The heterogeneity of this collection reflects the broad spectrum of interests and approaches to problems of theory being pursued at present in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Much of the work being done in these countries remains relatively unknown outside of Eastern Europe. This anthology is an attempt to rectify this situation and make better known the nature and extent of research which promises new insights into a whole range of phenomena in language, literature and culture.

The essays in this two-volume anthology provide the reader with an overview of current Czech, Polish and Hungarian research in language, literature and meaning as well as some new perspectives on the major theoretical contributions of Roman Ingarden, Georg Lukács and Jan Mukarovský. For the most part, the emphasis is on Poetics and Literary Theory; however, in some of the essays the focus shifts to such related disciplines as Aesthetics, Linguistics and Semiotics. The heterogeneity of this collection reflects the broad spectrum of interests and approaches to problems of theory being pursued at present in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Much of the work being done in these countries remains relatively unknown outside of Eastern Europe. This anthology is an attempt to rectify this situation and make better known the nature and extent of research which promises new insights into a whole range of phenomena in language, literature and culture.

This is the second volume of papers on sign-based linguistics to emerge from Columbia School linguistics conferences. One set of articles offers semantic analyses of grammatical features of specific languages: English full-verb inversion; Serbo-Croatian deictic pronouns; English auxiliary "do"; Italian pronouns "egli" and "lui"; the Celtic-influenced use of "on" (e.g., he played a trick "on" me ); a monosemic analysis of the English verb "break." A second set deals with general theoretical issues: a solution to the problem that noun class markers (e.g. Swahili) pose for sign-based linguistics; the appropriateness of statistical tests of significance in text-based analysis; the word or the morpheme as the locus of paradigmatic inflectional change; the radical consequences of Saussure s anti-nomenclaturism for syntactic analysis; the future of minimalist linguistics in a maximalist world. A third set explains phonotactic patterning in terms of ease of articulation: aspirated and unaspirated stop consonants in Urdu; initial consonant clusters in more than two dozen languages. An introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical points of each article and their relation to the Columbia School framework. The collection is relevant to cognitive semanticists and functionalists as well as those working in the sign-based Jakobsonian and Guillaumist frameworks.

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.

In this first book-length study of Czech structuralism and semiotics in English, F. W. Galan explores one of the most important intellectual currents of the twentieth century, filling the gap between what has been written of the Russian formalism of the twenties and the French structuralism of the sixties and seventies. He records the evolution within the Prague Linguistic Circle of those theories which concern literature's change in time and the place of literature in society. In doing so, he reveals how the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle in the years 1928 to 1946 vindicate structuralism against its critics' charges that the structuralist approach—in linguistics, literary theory, film studies, and related fields—is inherently unhistorical. Overcoming this apparent methodological impasse was the main challenge confronted by the scholars of the Prague School–Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky, in particular.

Addresses literary theory and criticism, comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and interdisciplinary perspectives.