Abstract
ur paper is a reflection on the genesis of the term "style" in the context of the founding of the Prague Linguistic Circle and the development of its thinking. By appreciating the specificity of this concept in Bohuslav Havranek's conception of it in the anthology Spoken Czech and Linguistic Culture, and by examining other work with the concept of style in the Prague School, we will attempt to present some notable features of the specifically Prague conception of structuralism. Discussing the division proposed by Patrik Sériot, we will show how Czech stylistics is connected to the debate on the nature of the sentence that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. We will conclude our examination by pointing out striking similarities with some concepts familiar from French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, especially in Roland Barthes.
The aim of our paper is to show that this is not merely a parallelism of thought, but a genuine thought-foundation, passing along almost imperceptible routes of scholarly reviews, submitted publications and sporadic visits.