Briefly on (the Bibliography of) Prague School Typology

Prague School typology is a research program founded by Vladimír Skalička, one of the main representatives of the second generation of the Prague School, and further developed by many of his followers. This website provides a complete bibliography of the texts written within this framework and is continually updated with newly published texts. The list is divided into several sections with further subdivisions.

Four sections are devoted to what can be called the centre of Prague School typology, i.e., the texts that acknowledge all the basic principles of this theory. It includes, first of all, the work of Vladimír Skalička (1909–1991), representing a significant reformulation of classical morphological typology in the spirit of Prague School functional structuralism. The basic principles are as follows:

A linguistic type is conceived as a construct, never fully realized in a particular language, and defined as a bundle of linguistic features connected by the relation of favourability.

Five types are worked with: isolating, agglutinative, inflectional, introflectional, and polysynthetic.

A particular language is a combination of the features of all the types, with the properties of one or more types predominating in that language (the dominant of language).

A typological portrayal of a language can be both synchronic, describing the ratio of properties of the individual types in a language at a certain moment, and diachronic, observing a movement from one combination of typological features to another.

Typologically relevant are particularly morphological features but also word-formation, syntactic, and phonological properties.

The other components of the centre of the Prague School typology are the texts by Petr Sgall (1926–2019) and Jaroslav Popela (1923–2011), two most outstanding followers of Vladimír Skalička. These scholars developed, each in his own way, on the question of the favourability of linguistic features in the type by establishing the dominant of type, i.e., the primary feature from which other properties are probabilistically derived. Whereas for Sgall, this fundamental property is a way of assigning form to grammatical function (by a free or bound morpheme, by alternations, and by order of the lexical items), for Popela, the dominant of type is a specific combination of the values of three parameters (favourability vs unfavourability to grammatical elements, unifunctional vs multifunctional grammatical elements, and the degree of fusion of grammatical and lexical elements).

Within the sections devoted to Vladimír Skalička, Petr Sgall, and Jaroslav Popela, the readers will find subsections referring to the writings by other authors on the life and work of these scholars (“About”). The reason for including this is that the vast majority of these texts of various genres (portraits, anniversary texts, obituaries, interviews) usually deal with, and sometimes significantly develop, the typological part of the three linguists’ work. The other subsections here are those referring to the published bibliographies of these authors (“Bibliographies”).

The centre of Prague School typology also includes many papers by other authors who continue to develop this approach in its theoretical or empirical aspects. Within this section, juvenile texts, that is, BA, MA, and PhD theses, are listed separately (“Theses”).

Also included in this bibliography are texts forming the periphery of Prague School typology. It is represented by two separate branches:

(1) The phonological typology developed by A. V. Isačenko and his followers, inspired by Skalička’s initial definition of the ratio of consonants to vowels in the language system as a typologically relevant feature.

(2) Helena Kurzová’s distinguishing of and working with the derivative-flectional and paradigmatic-flectional types. It has been recognized that both of these types may be subsumed under the Skaličkian inflectional type.

Vít Boček (vbocek@ujc.cas.cz) & Bohumil Vykypěl (vykypel@ujc.cas.cz)

The preparation of this web was financed within the statutory activity

of the Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences

(RVO No. 68378092).