The fourth volume of the revived series of “Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague” brings three contributions (by J. Vachek, O. Leška and V. Skalicka) connected with the classical period of the Prague School, as well as papers delivered at the conference “Function, Form, and Meaning: Bridges and Interfaces”, held in Prague in 1998. Some of the contributions concern issues of grammar of different languages including a syntactic annotation of a large Czech text corpus, a comparison of Hebrew conditionals with English, a characterization of the typology of the Indo-European verb. A further part focuses on topic-focus articulation (information sentence structure, functional sentence perspective), with a concept of ‘perspective’ introduced as close to but distinct from ‘topic’ and with three different viewpoints on the semantics of information structure. Two broader essays on the nature of language are then presented, while the last section analyzes the structure of free verse. The volume represents a contribution to the continuing fruitful interaction between the work of the Prague School and the more and less closely related approaches of linguists in other countries.Table of ContentsPreface vii Section I: The Prague tradition in retrospect Prolegomena to the history of the Prague School of Linguistics Josef Vachek 3 Anton Marty’s philosophy of language Oldrich Leška 83 Die Typologie des Ungarischen Vladimír Skalicka 101 Section II: Grammar Theoretical description of language as a basis of corpus annotation: The case of Prague Dependency Treebank Eva Hajicová 111 “Conditionals” in Hebrew and English: same or different? Yishai Tobin 129 Sur la paradigmatisation du verbe indo-européen (deuxième partie) Tomáš Hoskovec 143 Section III: Topic•focus articulation The Russian genitive of negation in existential sentences: The role of Theme•Rheme structure reconsidered Vladimir Borschev and Barbara H. Partee 185 Synonymy vs. differentiation of variant syntactic realizations of FSP functions Libuše Dušková 251 Topic • Focus articulation as generalized quantification Jaroslav Peregrin 263 Information structure and the partition of sentence meaning Klaus von Heusinger 275 Section IV: General views Freedom of language: Its nature, its sources, and its consequences Petr Sgall 309 The natural order of cognitive events Philip A. Luelsdorff 331 Section V: Poetics The principle of free verse Miroslav Červenka 365