The Prague School and Its Legacy

Many of the fundamental ideas of the classical Prague School have guided or inspired much of the interdisciplinary post World War II research in linguistics, literary theory, semiotics, folklore and the arts. The Prague School pro- moted a humanistic and functional Leitmotiv of language as an open, flexible, adaptable, and abstract system of systems used by human beings to communicate. This hommage to the Prague School presents papers in five areas of research: - Prague School phonology and its theoretical and methodological implications, — The Prague School and functional discourse analysis, — The Prague School and aspects of literary criticism, — The sociological and ethnographical concerns of the Prague School, — The Prague School's semiotic approach to the arts.