John E. Joseph

Addendum to “The distributed invention of enunciation theory”

A significant appearance of the term enunciation in work by Vilém Mathesius (1882–1946), a founding member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, is not mentioned in Joseph (2025) , which aims to widen the received history of enunciation theory. ‘Enunciation’ is the counterpart to ‘theme’ in Mathesius’s (1929) functional sentence perspective. His equating of enunciation (replaced in the 1930s by ‘rheme’) with ‘psychological predicate’ links his use of the term to the aim in later enunciation theory of bringing speakers and speech events directly into linguistic analysis.