Vilém Mathesius

Vilém was born as the youngest of two sons of Bedřich and Evelina Mathesius. His father was a wealthy tanner in a long line of tanners of Saxon origin, claiming Martin Luther's biographer Johannes Mathesius as an ancestor.[3][4] His cousin, Bohumil Mathesius, was a poet and translator.

Vilém was born in Pardubice in Eastern Bohemia in Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic). When he was 11, his family moved west to Kolín. There he attended a classic gymnasium and took particular interest in the study of language, taking classes in Latin, Greek, German, and French, in addition to his native language of Czech. He also taught himself some Italian and Russian, and met with the pastor Čeněk Dušek for private lessons in English.[4] Dušek also instructed Mathesius in Calvinism, the religion which Mathesius actively and devotedly practiced his whole life.[2][3]

In 1901, Mathesius began his studies of Germanic and Romance philology under the Neogrammarian Jan Gebauer at Charles University in Prague, earning both his B.A. and his PhD there.[5] The topic of his doctoral dissertation, which he submitted in 1907, was Hippolyte Taine's criticism of Shakespeare.[1][2] While serving as an assistant teacher of German at a secondary school in Plzeň, he wrote his habilitation thesis and submitted it in 1909. He spent the next 3 years working at Charles University as a privatdozent, then in 1912 he was appointed the university's first professor of Anglistics (English philology), effectively founding the department.[3] He remained head of the department until Charles University, along with all other Czech universities, was forcibly shut down by the Nazis on November 17, 1939.[5]

In 1908 Mathesius married Růžena Moravcová with whom he later had a son, Vilém (known as Vilík). Moravcová died unexpectedly in 1933 during a routine operation. Soon after, Mathesius married her sister, Antonia.[4]

Mathesius suffered a number of health problems during his lifetime. In 1922 he contracted an eye disease that eventually left him completely blind. This caused him to rely increasingly on his students, including René Wellek and Bohumil Trnka, to assist him in his teaching, reading, and writing.[3][6] Ten years later, in 1932, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the vertebrae, which caused him to be bed-ridden for a year and a half (1932–33).[3] In spite of these ailments, he continued to pursue his studies, teach his classes, and work with the Prague Circle,[2][3] until his death in Prague on 12 April 1945.[7]

Mathesius first met Roman Jakobson, an influential Russian linguist and co-founder of the Moscow Linguistic Circle, soon after Jakobson's arrival in Prague in 1920.[2][3] It was Jakobson who pointed out the need for a center for work and discussion for young linguists in the city, which coincided with Mathesius's patriotic desire to improve the state of scholarship in Czechoslovakia.[2] However, their plans would not be realized for half a decade.[3][6]

For a year and a half (March 1925 – October 1926), Mathesius hosted the sporadic and informal gatherings of young linguists that eventually became the Prague Linguistic Circle at his own house.[2] The first official meeting took place on October 6, 1926, at Mathesius's office.[2][3] Henrik Becker, a young German linguist, was the first speaker invited to give a lecture, which was attended by five people (including Mathesius and Jakobson) and followed by a discussion.[3][6] The Circle applied for official status in 1930, and Mathesius, as a senior member and well-established academic, served as its president.[2]

The Circle achieved international notice at two linguistic conferences: the First International Congress of Linguists at the Hague in 1928, then the First International Congress of Slavists in Prague in 1929.[4] They used these conferences as an opportunity to develop and present a set of ten theses for linguistic research, promoting a "functionalist" approach to the study of language.[2] Soon after the Prague Congress they issued their first independent publication, two volumes of the journal Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague ("Works of the Prague Linguistic Circle"), of which Mathesius was the editor-in-chief.[2][3][6] In addition, in 1936 the Circle began issuing a Czech periodical called Slovo a slovesnost ("Word and verbal art"), also with Mathesius as editor-in-chief.[1] Publication of Travaux ceased in 1939 due to the onset of World War II, but the journal began to be reissued in 1995 as part of a general effort to revive the Circle.[8] Slovo a slovesnost, which specializes in structuralist theory and Czech language, now continues (after a brief hiatus from 1942 to 1947) to be published as a quarterly.[2][9]

Mathesius's scholarly work is typically divided into three periods based on his academic and intellectual focus and his increasing interest in linguistic concerns.[5]

Mathesius's ideas on linguistic functionalism remained central to the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle and have been expanded upon by modern linguists in many directions. Linguistic approaches to information structure, including Functional Sentence Perspective and the topic-comment dichotomy, have grown out of Mathesius's writings through the work of Jan Firbas, František Daneš, Petr Sgall, and Eva Hajičová.[1] Mathesius's ideas also influenced Michael Halliday's development of systemic functional grammar.

Critics maintain that Mathesius lacked refined methodology, and that his observations of data could not amount to much because of his reluctance to propose unified theories to account for them.[2] His work never achieved the international renown of that of his colleagues, possibly because he wrote almost exclusively in Czech.[3]

Mathesius's brainchild, the Prague Circle, did much to elevate and improve Prague's reputation in the academic world and bring it to international attention.[2] Reflecting on the first ten years of the Circle, Mathesius summed up their contributions: "In foreign linguistics we fought for and won for our group the respectful title of the 'Prague School,' while at home, nobody can, without ill will, deny us the merit of having given many fresh impulses to Czech linguistic and literary research by our new standpoint and our new methods of work."[6] Although the Circle dissolved in 1949 due to internal political tension, it was revived in 1989 and now works to publish journals, host conferences, and promote academic work in language and linguistics.[2][11]

Mathesius is memorialized at Charles University by the Vilém Mathesius Centre for Research and Education in Semiotics and Linguistics[12] and by the Vilém Mathesius Foundation for the Promotion of English and American Studies in Prague, which issues annual awards for the best MA and BA theses in the Department of English and American Studies.[13]

• O potenciálnosti jevů jazykových (On the Potentiality of the Phenomena of Language ), 1911, English trans. J. Vachek 1964.
• Dějiny literatury anglické I–II (The History of English Literature I–II), 1910–1915
• Kulturní aktivismus (Cultural activism), 1925
• On Linguistic Characterology with Illustrations from Modern English, 1928 [published in English].
• Co daly naše země Evropě a lidstvu (What our lands contributed to Europe and mankind), 1940
• Možnosti, které čekají (Possibilities that await), 1944
• Obsahový rozbor současné angličtiny na základě obečně lingvistickém (A functional analysis of present-day English on a general linguistic basis), 1961 (publ. posthumously)
• Jazyk, kultura a slovesnost (Language, culture and poetic art), 1982

It is necessary to subject the language to such simplification that allows further work on it. (source: Vilém Mathesius: Jazyk, kultura a slovesnost (Language, culture and poetic art), 1982

• de Bray, R. G. (November 1946). "Obituaries: Vilém Mathesius". The Slavonic and East European Review. 25 (64).

• Prague Linguistic School