Vilém Mathesius

Vilém Mathesius (August 3, 1882 – April 12, 1945) was a Czech linguist and literary historian, a scholar of English and Czech literature.

Biography

Vilém Mathesius was born on August 3, 1882, in Pardubice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now in the Czech Republic).

After he had received his doctoral degree in Germanic and Romance studies, he begun to teach at Charles University in 1909. Eventually, he became the first professor of English language and literature there in 1912. His brother, Bohumil Mathesius, was a professor of philosophy at Charles University.

He conducted research in the grammar, phonology, and stylistics of the English and Czech languages. He was further interested in general linguistics, language culture, and general cultural issues. His works on word order and syntax are considered pioneering projects.

Mathesius co-founded the Prague linguistic circle (Pražský lingvistický kroužek) in 1926.

He died on April 12, 1945 in Prague.

Work

Prague Cultural Habitat

View of Prague from Klementinum national library

In order to understand the place and importance of the Prague Linguistic Circle on the intellectual map of the time, it is necessary to look at the cultural history. It is generally well-known that during the 1920s and 1930s, Prague and Czechoslovakia were the isles of freedom and democracy in Central Europe. Prague became a conglomerate of numerous traditions, cultural influences, and scientific aspirations. To many intellectuals at that time, it provided a refuge, a place where they could live and work.

The traditions of Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein, and Phillip Frank were then still very much alive there, and many Czech intellectuals commonly spoke Czech as well as German. Prague also provided a home to many leading intellectuals of various branches of learning, such as theoretical linguistics or, even, electrochemistry.

Czech, German, Jewish, and Russian influences all came to be mingled there. On one side, there would be Franz Kafka and on the other there might be Pitrim Sorokin, the sociologist who later became known for his Crisis of Our Age (published in 1950).

The Birth of the Prague Linguistic Circle

In 1920, Mathesius met Roman Jakobson and came into contact with another tradition. Soon, the other Russian linguists came to Prague: P.N. Bogatyrev, S.I. Kartsevsky, and Nikolai Trubetzkoy. Contacts were also established with the German linguists H. Becker and F. Slotty. Kartsevsky, who was a professor of Russian at Geneva University, introduced and brought the knowledge of the work of Ferdinand de Saussure to Prague.

These linguists were joined by B. Trnka, B. Havranek, and Jan Mukarovsky. They wanted to establish a discussion club or a group, and this came about following the lecture by Henrik Becker entitled "Der europaische Sprachgeist" on October 26, 1926, when the Prague Linguistic Circle was born.

Mathesius’ Major Works

Three periods of intellectual activity mark Mathesius' life. Highlighting the first period is his 1911 lecture, “O potenciálnosti jevu jazykových” (“On the Potentiality of Language Phenomenon”), anticipating the Saussurean distinction between “langue” and “parole” and emphasizing the importance of synchronic (nonhistorical) language study (with a “twist” in which he introduced the notion of “elastic stability”). He also published a two-volume "History of English literature" ("Dejiny anglické literatury"; 1910-15) and several Shakespearean studies. From 1926 to 1936, Mathesius' interest turned to syntax and semantics. In phonology he did research on the load and combining capability of phonemes. From 1936 on, his interest was in functional syntax and the sentence.

Mathesius’ synthesis and "diachronic/synchronic" approach

In line with the then prevailing empirical approach, linguistics in the nineteenth century was concerned with the sound, not the content or meaning, of words. It was the school of "young grammarians" (die Junggrammatiker) that started to address more systematically the origins and development of a language, looking at its historical aspects. Such an approach is known as “diachronic.” Their aim was to reconstruct a presupposed "proto-language."

The main representative of the school of Junggrammatiker in Bohemia was Jan Gebauer (1838—1907), the author of The Historical Grammar of the Czech Language and The Dictionary of the Old Czech. Besides Gebauer there was Josef Zubaty (1855-1931), professor of Indian studies and comparative Indo-European linguistics, who was also involved in this field.

Apart from the “diachronic approach,” or historical linguistics, there was also a “synchronic approach" (descriptive linguistics), entailing the study of a linguistic system in a particular state, without reference to time. The main representative of the latter approach was the world-renowned Wilhelm von Humboldt.

The first person within the Czech environment who attempted to synthesize these two approaches was Vilem Mathesius. He was inspired by the work of his friend, the natural scientist, Jaroslav Peklo. Mathesius was looking for an equivalent of the classification system employed by natural history and, as he said, he found it in general or theoretical linguistics.

A structure can be thought out and, subsequently, analyzed without considering either its historical or descriptive aspects, that is, regardless of the character of the language units and components that make up such a structure. Thus structure emerges as what is beyond the physical, the formal, different from the generic fabric, and free of historic development, free of function or purpose. With this approach it is actually irrelevant whether we are looking at a linguistic or a natural science structure. It was this analogy that in the 1920s was an impetus that made Mathesius to turn to general linguistics and formulated his ideas of analytical comparison (Nadin 1995).

As the structure, implying (whatever) relation between the two elements, was perceived as an expression of equilibrium, it was Mathesius who first introduced the notion of "elastic stability" into the pre-Saussurian linguistics. He felt that once fluctuations are acknowledged, we are closer to understanding living processes, if not in the language of equilibrium in thermodynamics, then at least in its spirit. This is how his famous term “diachronic/synchronic” came into being (Nadin 1995).

Besides the term "diachronic/synchronic," Mathesius established another distinguishing term "static/dynamic," presumably to acknowledge the growth and development effect in language.

Eventually, his most important work became a paper on the "potentiality of linguistic phenomena," which was published in 1911 in the Bulletin of the Royal Czech Society. Thus, four years before Ferdinand de Saussure, Vilem Mathesius presented these propositions that were to affect the course of the development of linguistics.

Mathesius’ topical structure analysis

To describe coherence in a text, topical structure analysis, developed from the topic-comment theory of the Prague School of Linguistics (Prague Linguistic Circle), inspects the semantic relationships between sentence topics and the overall discourse topic by investigating the repetitions, shifts, and reoccurrences of topic.

There, coherence is taken to be a semantic property of discourse formed through the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences. Interpretation implies interaction between the text and the reader, and it is in this theoretical perspective, as opposed to focusing solely on the text, that Mathesius laid the foundation for topical structure analysis.

Vilem Mathesius used the term "theme" (or "topic") to identify "what the sentence is about" and the term "enunciation" (or "rheme") to refer to "what is said about" the theme.

In a point relevant to the theoretical basis for topical structure analysis, Mathesius maintained that

the theme of a sentence announces 'what is known or at least obvious in a given situation and from which the speaker proceeds in his discourse,' while enunciation adds new or unknown information to the discourse (Mathesius 1975).

This approach is generally described as a combination of structuralism (i.e. the context, not just the basic units or components, is what is important) and functionalism (every unit or component of a language: phoneme, morpheme, word, sentence, exists only because each fulfils a certain function).

Taken further, synchronic and diachronic approaches to the study of language are interconnected, influencing one another, but without the synchronic approach being static (i.e. it is not the "static" as in Mathesius’ corroborative term "static/dynamic").

Critiques and inconsistencies

Mathesius’ method of "analytical comparison," as much ahead of its time as many of his ideas, is a suggestion so vague that neither in 1911, when he first formulated the goal of “diachronic/synchronic” research, nor at any future time did it mean more than what “synchronic” meant in the works of Wilhelm von Humboldt or Baudouin de Courtenay (Fiala 1989).

There were many critical distinctions vis-a-vis Saussure made by the Prague School and by other structuralists regardless of their epistemological affiliation, which is natural in any newly-born scientific discipline. Mathesius’ idea of "analytical comparison"— based on functionalist analysis of semiotic systems in relation to social functions, such as communication, rather than treating them purely as autonomous forms (in contrast to Saussure and Hjelmslev)—may have, as an idea, withstood the test of time.

While in retrospect it is clear what prompted Mathesius’ original focus on synchrony, and the manifest according to which only synchrony allows us to grasp the nature of what Saussure defined as "langue" (language, in opposition to "parole", speech), it is less clear why structure emerges as such a powerful instrument of thinking, unless structure comes face to face with its adversary, history, and adopts it (Fiala 1989).

Legacy

The Prague Linguistic Circle was one of the most influential schools of linguistic thought in pre-war linguistics. Although the "classical period" of the Circle can be dated between 1926, the year of the first meeting, and the beginning of World War II, its roots reach the earlier work of its members. Among the founding members were Vilém Mathesius (President of PLC until his death in 1945), Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Sergei Karcevskiy, and many others who began to meet in the mid-twenties to discuss issues of common interest.

Their, at first, irregular meetings consisting of lectures and discussions gradually developed into regular ones. The first results of the members' cooperative efforts were presented in joint theses prepared for the First International Congress of Slavicists held in Prague in 1929.

These were published in the first volume of the series Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague. The Théses outlined some of the most important concepts—such as the approach to the study of language as a synchronic, yet dynamic, system, the functionality of elements of language, and the importance of the social function of language—that were explicitly laid down as the basis for further research of the world’s linguistics community.

Mathesius is also memorialized by the Vilém Mathesius Centre for Research and Education in Semiotics and Linguistics at Charles University in Prague.

Publications

• Mathesius, V.,Jazyk, kultura a slovesnost (Language, Culture and Literature). (Prague: Odeon. 1982); esp. see chapter entitled ‘Deset let Pražského lingvistického kroužku; (Ten Years of Prague Linguistic Circle), 439-448.
• Mathesius, V., Dějiny literatury anglické I - II (The History of English Literature I - II)
• Mathesius, V., Obsahový rozbor současné angličtiny (Content Analysis of Contemporary English)
• Mathesius, V., Cestina a obecny jazykozpyt. Soubor stati. Prague: Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences, 1947.
• Mathesius, V., On linguistic characterology. Actes du Ier Congrès International des Linguistes, 1928, pp.56-63.
• Mathesius, V.,Výbor Jazyk, kultura a slovesnost (anthology Language, Culture and Poetic Art)
• Mathesius V., A Functional Analysis of Present Day English on a General Linguistic Basis, ed. by J. Vachek , transl. by Libuše Dušková, Mouton, The Hague - Paris 1975

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Doubravová, J.,”The ‘Cercle Linguistique de Prague’ and the ‘Wiener Kreis’ “Charles U., Prague
• Fiala, J. “Pražský meziválecný strukturalismus” (Structuralism in Prague between the Wars), in: Geometrie živého: Matematické modely morfogeneze (The Geometry of Living: Mathematical Models of Form Generating), ZP CSVTS at Fgu CSAV, Prague, 1989, 79—94.
• Nadin, Mihai, Dy namic and Structure (Chaos, Dynamic, Dissipative Strukturen), Plenums-Vortrag auf der internationalen Konferenz ,,Strukturalismus" an der Technischen Universität Dresden, 23.4.1995
• Saussure, Ferdinand de , Course in General Linguistics ,Tr. by W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1966
• Steiner, P. (ed). The Prague School 1929-1946 University of Texas.

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