Ales Svoboda

Aleš Svoboda (2 April 1941 in Zlín – 9 January 2010 in Opava), was a Czech linguist and a prominent representative of the Prague School of linguistics. His early interests lead him to study music and clarinet play at Brno conservatoire, but later it was a keen interest in languages which brought him to study English, German and Czech at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University. In 1970 he became an Assistant Professor of the Department of English and American Studies at the faculty. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor at Charles University in Prague in 1981 and to Full Professor at Masaryk University in Brno in 1992. Apart from Masaryk University in Brno, he also taught at Silesian University in Opava and at the University of Ostrava (both in the Czech Republic), and at University of Prešov (Slovakia).

He was a disciple and close collaborator of Professor Jan Firbas and together with him a lead investigator of a theory of Information Structure of language called Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), inspired by the work of Vilém Mathesius. He wrote many papers on the topic, two monographs and 50 encyclopedic entries describing FSP. His most important contribution to the development of the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective was its application to the subclausal level.