Prague Linguistic Circle Papers. New Series, vol. 4 (review)

This is the fourth volume in the TCLP series begun in 1995. It consists of thirteen papers assigned to five parts. The majority of contributors are from the Czech Republic; also represented are scholars from Germany (two) and from the United States, Russia, and Israel (one from each country).

Part 1, ‘The Prague tradition in retrospect’ (1–108), contains three papers by now-deceased members of the Circle. The first is by Josef Vachek (1909–1996), the Circle’s most courageous defender during the bleak post-World War II years. His long paper, ‘Prolegomena to the history of the Prague School of Linguistics’, was first published in 1999, three years after his death (I reviewed the original Czech version in Language 76.471–72, 2000). The second paper, by Oldřich Leška (1927–1997), is titled ‘Anton Marty’s philosophy of language’ (83–99). Swiss-born Marty taught at Prague’s German University until his death in 1914, and some of his lectures were attended by Vilém Mathesius, the Circle’s founder. According to Leška, ‘it was easy for Mathesius [to transform Marty’s] general ideas [about language] into an effective system of descriptive functional grammar’ (92). The last paper in this part is Vladimír Skalička’s ‘Die Typologie des Ungarischen’ (101–8). Skalička (1909–1991), a Finno-Ugricist, taught general linguistics, and many of his publications dealt with linguistic typology; this chapter is a translation of a paper published in 1967 in Hungarian.

The first paper of Part 2, ‘Grammar’ (109–81), is by Eva Hajičová. In her article ‘Theoretical description of language as a basis of corpus annotation: The case of Prague Dependency Treebank’, the author argues that annotation (tagging) scenarios should include an underlying level of syntactic annotation, and she then attempts to demonstrate that the design of such a scenario is feasible if it is based on a sound, explicit linguistic theory. Next, Yishai Tobin asks if ‘conditionals’ in Hebrew and English are the same or different, and concludes that the Hebrew system of conditionals classifies alternative perceptions of possibilities according to a totally different set of semantic criteria. Indo-Europeanists would be interested in Tomáš Hoskovec’s article ‘Sur la paradigmatisation du verbe indo-européen’ (begun in TCLP 3), in which he describes the structure of verbal paradigms in Greek and Latin, and in Baltic and Slavic languages.

Part 3, ‘Topic-focus articulation’ (183–305), begins with a paper by Vladimir Borschev and Barbara H. Partee. While a full account of the problem of the Russian genitive of negation in existential sentences is yet to be attained, a picture may slowly be emerging: aspects of both functional and formal (syntactic) approaches may have to be employed for an adequate description. The aim of Libuše Dušková’s paper is to show that the functional sentence perspective (FSP) structure of the different syntactic realizations of the second participant in verbal action with the FSP function of the theme is to some extent differentiated rather than interchangeable. In a paper originally published in 1995, Jaroslav Peregrin claims that the theory of generalized quantifiers can provide for an adequate framework for the analysis of the topic-focus articulation. Klaus von Heusinger presents a different approach to dealing with information structure. He argues for a two-level semantics, with one level corresponding to the meaning of a sentence, and the other to the background meaning.

In Part 4, ‘General views’ (307–62), Petr Sgall writes about the nature, sources, and consequences of freedom in natural languages. Philip A. Luelsdorff proposes that English has four tenses (future, present, past, and generic) and four aspects (to future, progressive, perfect, and passive); the tenses express...