Vilém Mathesius

Personal life and studies

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. Vilém was born in Pardubice, a city in Eastern Bohemia (modern-day Czech Republic, then part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire). When he was 11 his family moved west to Kolín, a town near Prague, where he attended a classic gymnázium and took particular interest in studies of language, taking classes on 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. Dušek also instructed Mathesius in Calvinism, the religion which Mathesius actively and devotedly practiced his whole life.

In 1901, Mathesius began his studies of Germanic and Romance philology at Charles University in Prague under the Neogrammarian Jan Gebauer, earning his PhD in 1907 after writing a thesis on Hippolyte Taine's criticism of Shakespeare. While serving as an assistant teacher of German at a secondary school in Plzeň, he wrote his habilitation thesis and submitted it in 1909. Immediately after, he began his 30-year-long career at Charles University, which ended when the Nazis closed the school in 1939. After 3 years working at the university as a privatdozent, in 1912 he was appointed as the university's first professor of Anglistics (English philology), effectively founding the department.

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

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. 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). In spite of these ailments, he continued to pursue his studies, teach his classes, and work with the Prague Circle.

Work with the Prague Circle

Mathesius first met Roman Jakobson, an influential Russian linguist and former member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle, soon after Jakobson's arrival in Prague in 1920. 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 nationalistic desire to improve the state of scholarship in Czechoslovakia. However, their plans were not to be realized for half a decade.

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. The first official meeting took place on October 6, 1926, at Mathesius's office. Henrik Becker, a young German linguist, was the first speaker invited to give a lecture, which was attended by Mathesius, Jakobson, Bohumil Trnka, Bohuslav Havránek, and Jan Rypka, and followed by a discussion. The Circle applied for official status in 1930, and Mathesius, as a senior member and well-established academic, served as its president.

The Circle achieved international notice with its publication of a set of ten theses for linguistic research at the First International Congress of Slavists in Prague in 1929. Soon after they issued their first independent publication, two volumes of the journal Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, of which Mathesius was the editor-in-chief. 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.

Scholarship

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

First Phase (1910-1926)

During the beginning of his career, Mathesius's interests were split between literary history and linguistics. He undertook to assemble a compendium of the history of English literature, and managed to publish two volumes (1910-1915) before the loss of his eyesight cut his work short. The works, which cover from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late Middle Ages, were foundational in establishing the Anglistics department at the university. He also worked on Shakespeare and his critics, writing a number of articles on the topic in 1916, the year of Shakespeare's Jubilee.

Alongside his literary works, he began exploring linguistic theory and pushing back against the Neogrammarian theories that dominated the study of language at his time. In 1911 he presented one of his more famous lectures to the Royal Learned Society, "On the potentiality of the language phenomenon", which anticipates Ferdinand de Saussure's critical distinction between langue and parole (1916) and emphasizes the importance of the synchronic (in his words, "static") study of language.

Second Phase (1926-1936)

In his second period of intellectual development, which coincided with the first decade of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Mathesius explored the nature of syntax and semantics and also contributed to the Circle's work on phonology, introducing the ideas of functional load and combining capacity of phonemes. This is also the point at which he joined the modern linguistic trend toward structuralism.

Third Phase (1936-45)

The third and final period of Mathesius's work, which lasted until his death, was devoted to functionalist theories of grammar, of which he is considered one of the founders. He divided communication into two separate processes which occur simultaneously: 'naming' (selecting lexical items) and 'correlating' (ordering lexical items with syntactic relations). The study of the former he called 'functional onomatology' and the latter 'functional syntax.' He also became more concerned with issues of stylistics, such as rhythm and intonation, in both Czech and English.

Throughout his scholarly career and particularly after the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Mathesius advocated for cultural activism, as defined by the first president of Czechoslovakia, T. G. Masaryk. In Mathesius's mind, cultural activism entailed the revitalization of the Czech national spirit and reform of national holidays, among other things. He published two major collections on the topic, Kulturní aktivismus (Cultural activism) in 1925, and Co daly naše země Evropě a lidstvu (What our lands contributed to Europe and mankind) in 1940.

Legacy

Mathesius's ideas on linguistic functionalism remained central to the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle (which dissolved in 1951) and have been expanded upon by modern linguists such as Jan Firbas, František Daneš, and Petr Sgall and carried further into the field of stylistics by Bohumil Havránek. The Prague Circle, in turn, did much to elevate and improve Prague's reputation in the academic world and bring it to international attention.

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."

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. His work remains obscure, possibly because he wrote almost exclusively in Czech.

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

Main works