Celebrating a century of Functional Structuralism and exploring its connections with Corpus Linguistics.
On 6th October 2026, the Prague Linguistic Circle celebrated the centenary of its first meeting, held exactly 100 years earlier, in 1926, at 4 Valentinská Street in Prague. It was here that Professor Vilém Mathesius and his colleagues gave the initial impetus to what would become the world-renowned tradition of Functional Structuralism – an intellectual movement that has profoundly shaped modern linguistics and continues to inspire research into language and communication today.
It was a great honour to be invited to contribute to this historic celebration by delivering a lecture exploring the synergies between the Prague School’s functionalist tradition and contemporary corpus linguistics, particularly the approach developed at CASS.
Methodus quaerens theoriam: Method Seeking Theory
My lecture had the Latin title Methodus quaerens theoriam, which can be translated as ‘A method seeking theory.’ This title captures a fundamental aspect of corpus linguistics: as a incredibly versatile method it focuses on innovation, driven by the systematic analysis of authentic language data (corpora) and seeks to support theoretical foundations that can help us better understand language and society.
Corpus linguistics provides powerful tools for identifying patterns of language use across large collections of texts. Yet these patterns do not speak for themselves. To interpret them meaningfully, we need theories that explain why language is used in particular ways, how linguistic choices relate to communicative purposes and how language both reflects and shapes the social world.
This is precisely where the Prague School’s functionalist tradition offers an important intellectual connection.
Functionalism and Corpus Linguistics: A Shared Intellectual Foundation
The Prague Linguistic Circle established a tradition of understanding language not simply as an abstract system of structures, but as a functional system shaped by communication, context and social purpose.
A century later, these ideas resonate strongly with the principles underpinning modern corpus linguistics and CASS.
Indeed, the 48 principles outlined in McEnery and Brezina’s (2022) book Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics (CUP) are highly compatible with this intellectual tradition. The connection is particularly explicit in Principle 40, which embraces a fundamentally functionalist understanding of language:
Principle 40: “We believe that those producing language generate output which they believe to be appropriate and well formed from the point of view of their speech community for the purpose of communication in the cognitive, social and physical context in which the utterance was produced, bounded by time.”
McEnery & Brezina (2022, p. 155)
Snapshots: The Present and the Past
The centenary celebrations were accompanied by a public exhibition at the National Library of the Czech Republic, showcasing the rich history and enduring intellectual legacy of the Prague Linguistic Circle.
The exhibition offered a fascinating glimpse into the past, highlighting the remarkable contributions of the scholars whose pioneering ideas, first developed in Prague a century ago, continue to shape linguistic research around the world. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on the connections between past and present, celebrating a century of intellectual innovation and the continuing relevance of the Prague School’s ideas to contemporary linguistics.
Watch the vlog: You can also watch my vlog summarising the centenary celebrations and reflecting on the significance of this remarkable event.
