Contains key papers by the founders of the Prague School; including Vilém Mathesius famous article Functional Linguistics (1929), the theses presented at the First Congress of Slavists in Prague (1929), an earlier paper by Mathesius On the potentiality of the phenomena of language (1911), Jan Muka?ovský's Standard language and poetic language (1932) and other historical contributions by B. Havránek, V. Skali?ka, and B. Trnka.