The Octoroon (premièred in New York in 1859) by the Irish, and later naturalized American playwright Dion Boucicault, is in principle a harmless melodrama—save for a potentially explosive element, an interracial couple. Its staging directly before the outbreak of the US Civil War contributed to stirring up the debate over the abolition of slavery (together with the then comparably popular dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, particularly the one by George L. Aiken) and conversely, this element also called for various textual adjustments. The interracial motif had to be suppressed for American audiences, while the London audience demanded a happy ending—and thus a reunion of the white young man and the one-eight former slave. The paper investigates the aesthetic, political and personal reasons why he originally resisted to change the play into a melodrama with a happy ending.

This book presents a selection of several articles that characterize the main strands of linguistic thinking of Czech functionalists, particularly with respect to the English language. Several classic and well-known papers are complemented with an introductory chapter that outlines the basic theoretical concepts of Czech functionally-oriented linguistics as it developed in the first half of the twentieth century ("the Prague School"). The book is freely available online in multiple formats (PDF, EPUB, MOBI; see the link below).

This book chapter focuses on important “prefigurations” of parts of linguistic pragmatics from the late nineteenth century to around 1970 which were informed by a “functional” view of language. We view “functional linguistics” as the study of language that starts its research with a focus on the functions of language in social life: the effects of language use, differentiated as to types of communicators, types of contexts and types of language uses. This includes the analysis of the primarily intended goals of the speech participants in their speaking and reacting as well as the study of the long-time effects of language use in the life of the individual and in the history of the language. We confine ourselves to results of functional linguistics that have actually been transmitted to linguistic pragmatics and may be counted among its foundations. Such results are found foremost in the works of four theorists: the German psychologist Karl Bühler (1879–1963), the Czech scholar of English Vilém Mathesius (1882–1945), the Russian general linguist and scholar of Slavonic languages Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and the British general linguist Michael Halliday. Of these, we will discuss the relevant theories of the first three. Bühler proposed an influential model of three fundamental “language functions”, which Jakobson came to extend to the model with six such functions that has had a strong impact on pragmatics, the ethnography of communication and social semiotics. Furthermore, both Bühler and Jakobson analysed the functioning of the deictic elements of language, emphasising their role in the “situated” nature of language use. Mathesius, who was more specifically concerned with the comparison of living languages as to their possibilities of expression, provided the foundations of the functional analysis of utterances in terms of the notions “theme” and “rheme” (“topic”–“comment”), which has become one of the stock items of pragmatic analysis. For their ideas in this domain, both Bühler and Mathesius were indebted to the work of the older and less well-known psychologically oriented German linguist Philipp Wegener (1848–1916), who held views that also show a strong affinity to those of modern linguistic pragmatics. In our view, these insights still provide valid reasons to integrate the description of elements of the situational context into linguistic analysis itself and thus to question the wisdom of completely separating research into the system of language from pragmatics, the study of its use.