Prague Linguistic Circle Papers

The fourth volume of the revived series of “Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague” brings three contributions (by J. Vachek, O. Leška and V. Skalička) connected with the classical period of the Prague School, as well as papers delivered at the conference “Function, Form, and Meaning: Bridges and Interfaces”, held in Prague in 1998. Some of the contributions concern issues of grammar of different languages including a syntactic annotation of a large Czech text corpus, a comparison of Hebrew conditionals with English, a characterization of the typology of the Indo-European verb. A further part focuses on topic-focus articulation (information sentence structure, functional sentence perspective), with a concept of ‘perspective’ introduced as close to but distinct from ‘topic’ and with three different viewpoints on the semantics of information structure. Two broader essays on the nature of language are then presented, while the last section analyzes the structure of free verse. The volume represents a contribution to the continuing fruitful interaction between the work of the Prague School and the more and less closely related approaches of linguists in other countries.