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 five years the Permanent International Committee of Linguists (CIPL) organises a world congress for linguists. And every five years the Committee faces the challenge of presenting a programme at the highest possible level. The CIPL Executive Committee decided for the Congress planned for 2003 in Prague to focus on four major topics which play an important role in today s linguistic debate: 1. Typology, 2. Endangered Languages, 3. Methodology and Linguistics (including fieldwork) and 4. Language and the mind. Leading experts have introduced the four themes in their plenary lectures in the course of the congress, which served as a basis for the articles presented in the current volume. This book should be a welcome tool for all linguists wishing to find their way quickly in current developments. A CD-Rom containing the full proceedings of the Prague Congress is included.

The first edition of ELL (1993, Ron Asher, Editor) was hailed as "the field's standard reference work for a generation". Now the all-new second edition matches ELL's comprehensiveness and high quality, expanded for a new generation, while being the first encyclopedia to really exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics. * The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field * An entirely new work, with new editors, new authors, new topics and newly commissioned articles with a handful of classic articles * The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics through the online edition * Ground-breaking and International in scope and approach * Alphabetically arranged with extensive cross-referencing * Available in print and online, priced separately. The online version will include updates as subjects develop ELL2 includes: * c. 7,500,000 words * c. 11,000 pages * c. 3,000 articles * c. 1,500 figures: 130 halftones and 150 colour * Supplementary audio, video and text files online * c. 3,500 glossary definitions * c. 39,000 references * Extensive list of commonly used abbreviations * List of languages of the world (including information on no. of speakers, language family, etc.) * Approximately 700 biographical entries (now includes contemporary linguists) * 200 language maps in print and online Also available online via ScienceDirect – featuring extensive browsing, searching, and internal cross-referencing between articles in the work, plus dynamic linking to journal articles and abstract databases, making navigation flexible and easy. For more information, pricing options and availability visit www.info.sciencedirect.com. The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics Ground-breaking in scope - wider than any predecessor An invaluable resource for researchers, academics, students and professionals in the fields of: linguistics, anthropology, education, psychology, language acquisition, language pathology, cognitive science, sociology, the law, the media, medicine & computer science. The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field

How does a country find itself 'at war' over spelling? This book focuses on a crucial juncture in the post-communist history of the Czech Republic, when an orthographic commission with a moderate reformist agenda found itself the focus of enormous public controversy. Delving back into history, Bermel explores the Czech nation's long tradition of intervention and its association with the purity of the language, and how in the twentieth century an ascendant linguistic school - Prague Functionalism - developed into a progressive but centralizing ideology whose power base was inextricably linked to the communist regime. Bermel looks closely at the reforms of the 1990s and the heated public reaction to them. On the part of language regulators, he examines the ideology that underlay the reforms and the tactics employed on all sides to gain linguistic authority, while in dissecting the public reaction, he looks both at conscious arguments marshaled in favor of and against reform and at the use, conscious and subconscious, of metaphors about language. Of interest to faculty and students working in the area of language, cultural studies, and history, especially that of transitional and post-communist states, this volume is also relevant for those with a more general interest in language planning and language reform. The book is awarded with the "The George Blazyca Prize in East European Studies 2008".

Monografie se věnuje anglickému odbornému diskursu a zaměřuje se na několik jeho zásadních rysů. Ačkoli probírá celou řadu dílčích témat, kniha se zabývá především třemi standardy textuality, a sice intertextualitou, koherencí a informativitou. V publikaci se všechny tyto standardy protínají v globálním tématu, které je zde jedinečně uchopeno jako soubor relevantních rysů – je ztvárněno v titulech, v klíčových slovech a jejich výskytu v samotném textu a rozvíjí se v jednotlivých odborných subžánrech, tématech odstavců a dále se prohlubuje zahrnutím relevantních citací. Tato monografie se věnuje výhradně psanému odbornému diskursu. Soustavně vychází z analýzy autentických dat diskursu humanitních věd. Publikaci profilují především stylistické, textově-lingvistické a diskursní analýzy, které čerpají z celé škály relevantních teorií včetně aktuálního členění větného, čímž nepřímo ověřují jejich nosnost. Všechny kapitoly předkládají kvantitativní i kvalitativní analýzu dat, mezi těmito pohledy usilují o rovnováhu a pokoušejí se vždy o funkční interpretaci zjištění. Z epistemologického hlediska jsou všechny studie zahrnuté do této publikace pevně spjaty s funkčně strukturalistickou tradicí Pražské školy, která je přirozeně obohacena o moderní přístupy ze světové lingvistiky. This monograph deals with English academic discourse and focuses on some of its constitutive features. Although a variety of particular topics are addressed, the volume is largely centred on three standards of textuality, namely intertextuality, coherence, and informativity. In this book, all these standards meet in the Global Theme, which is grasped here uniquely as a cluster of relevant features – embodied by the titles, lists of keywords and their in-text use, and further developed through diverse academic subgenres, through paragraph themes and enhanced by integrating relevant citations. This monograph explores written academic discourse exclusively. It is firmly established on the systematic investigation of authentic data drawn from the discourse of the humanities. The book profiles stylistic, text linguistic and discourse analyses, employing a range of relevant theories, including the Functional Sentence Perspective, and thus indirectly verifying their viability. All the chapters provide quantitative as well as qualitative analyses of data, striving to achieve an appropriate balance and to interpret the findings functionally. From the epistemological viewpoint, all of the studies involved in the monograph are rooted in the Prague functionalist tradition, naturally enriched by modern approaches from world linguistics.