Balcania et Slavia. Studi linguistici | Studies in linguistics is a newly founded international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the modern Slavic and Balkan languages from the perspective of theoretical, areal-typological, and contrastive linguistics. The Journal intends to promote high-quality scholarly work on all topics relevant to the theoretical description and analysis of Slavic and Balkan languages in synchrony as well as in diachrony. The main areas of interest include, but are not limited to, their structural make-up, contact in space and time, variation and microvariation in the Balkan-Slavic area, first and second language acquisition in bilingual and multilingual environments. Although it is based at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the Journal aims at providing an international academic platform where scholars and researchers working within both the traditional and the more recently developed experimental frameworks can share novel ideas and advance theoretical proposals in the field of Slavic and Balkan linguistics.

The present article deals with the concept of the goal-oriented linguistic model developed by the Prague Linguistic Circle and presented in the Prague Theses (1929) as linguistic “purposefulness”. This approach is often classified as a teleological viewpoint on language phenomena. Teleology being incompatible with the present-day scientific framework (both in the humanities and the natural sciences), this part of the Prague linguistic heritage has only rarely been dealt with in depth and has been almost forgotten in recent years. P. Sériot speaks of “allusions likely to be negligently skipped over today because they no longer make sense to the contemporary reader” (Sériot, 2014, 20). In this paper, I attempt to introduce the notion of “purposefulness” in a different light, avoiding teleological thinking and reinterpreting “purposefulness” in a more plausible way for a contemporary reader. In fact, the choice of the term “purposefulness” might have originated due to a lack of suitable terminology and might be reconstructed in connection with contemporary dynamic approaches in linguistics.