Prague School influence: summary

[Ellen F. Prince]

George Lakoff wrote:

<snip>

>To my knowledge, Halliday had no influence at all on the introduction of
>discussions of topicality into generative semantics. In my recollection, we
>starting discussing topicality in 1965-66, under the influence of Dwight
>Boliger
>(who was my Harvard colleague and audited the course Haj and I gave there
>and at MIT in fall 1966) and Susumu Kuno, who ran the project Haj and I
>worked on and was talking with us about topicality from the perspective of
>the Japanese syntax,  where wa-constructions indicate topicality and are
>one of the most prominent syntactic features of the language. McCawley, of
>course, was also thinking about wa-constructions in Japanese. I never met
>Halliday till 1968, when he came to Cambridge and, as I recall, talked
>about other issues.
>
>Incidentally, the person who puched Prague School ideas on information flow
>the most here at Berkeley during the 70's was Wally Chafe, who of course
>was a major force behind the formation of the functionalist school first
>here and later at Santa Barbara. His influence here has been persistent.

What you say about Halliday is exactly how I remember it but, at least
by the early '70s, Kuno was indeed talking about the Prague school. I
remember reading Mathesius and Firbas on his recommendation at that
time.