Vilém Mathesius

Vilém Mathesius ( born August 3, 1882 in Pardubice, † April 12, 1945 in Prague ) was a Prague linguist, historian and Anglist.

After graduation in Kolin Mathesius studied from 1901 Slavic, Germanic and Romance studies at the Prague German Charles-Ferdinand University and worked as a school teacher. In 1909 he qualified as a professor in English and was built in 1912 for the first ( extraordinary) professor of this subject at Prague's Charles University appointed. There he received in 1919 the Department of English, he built the Anglistische Seminar of the Charles University and its library. Since the beginning of the twenties, characterized by various diseases, he went blind in 1932 and then completely focused mainly on lectures on the radio, in which he made known to the English -widening circles of the population. After the closing of Czech universities in 1939 he retired to his parents' house in Kolin, but had to go to his bombed early 1945 to return to Prague, where he died shortly before the war ended.

Mathesius was the author of numerous works for English, Czech and general linguistics. Among other things, he is considered the founder of the theory of the topic - rheme structure and with his work "On the potentiality of language phenomena " (O potenciálnosti jevů jazykových ) of 1911 as an important precursor of the Prague Linguistic Circle, which he then co-founded in 1926.

His cousin was the poet, journalist and translator Bohumil Mathesius.