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.

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.

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.

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.

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".