Prague School influence: summary

[Carl Mills]

>>To:            FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU
>Reply-to:      "Ellen F. Prince" <ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU>
>
>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.
>
And Ellen  Prince replied:

>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.
>

At Oregon in the early 70's, Jim Hoard and Dale Sloat did have Trubetzkoy on the reserve reading list for
phonology courses.  In syntax, neither Hoard nor Sloat nor, as far as I remember, Derry Malsch required Firbas
or any of the other Prague School syntacticians.  I read them on my own, and Jim Hoard was perfectly willing to
discuss them.  It was in the late 70's at Tromsoe that I had a chance to discuss Functional Sentence Perspective
with Leiv Egil Breivik, who was at that time working on English existential-there sentences.

Carl Mills