Collected Works of Jan Firbas

Jan Firbas (1921–2000) was a Czech linguist and a prominent representative of the Prague School of linguistics. He is world famous for his theory of information structure called Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) published in his monograph Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Although there are more than 150 entries in his bibliography, the texts are spread across different journals, conference proceedings, and festschrifts in English, Czech, German, and Russian. This five volume opus will provide access to most of the papers of this outstanding Czech scholar. The papers are accompanied by forewords, annotations, and biographical notes written by the editors and other contributors. 
The first volume contains papers published between 1951 and 1967, the second between 1968 and 1978, and the third from the period 1979 and 1986. 

Jan Firbas was born in Brno, in the Czech Republic, he studied English, German and philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. From 1949 he was a member of the Department of English and American Studies of the faculty until his death in 2000. He became a member of the Prague Linguistics Circle, which was outlawed by the communist government. Persecution from the communist government and the fact that he came from an old Protestant family and refused to renounce his belief significantly delayed his academic career. Despite his international renown, it took him ten years to have his habilitation officially approved and he was only appointed Professor in 1990. In 1986, he was awarded Honorary Doctorates by the Universities of Leuven and Leeds, and in 2000 by the University of Turku.
Firbas developed a theory of Information Structure called Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), inspired by the work of Vilém Mathesius. Firbas's most diligent disciple was Aleš Svoboda, with whom he closely collaborated especially in the 1970s and 1980s on the development and refinement of the key concepts in the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective.