Book excerpt: The 15 contributions in the present collection can be divided roughly into three groups: (1) Papers directly following up functional stylistics and the theory of language culture, elaborated in the classical period of the Prague Linguistic School. (2) Papers concerning the problems of style in a wider communicative arena. These contributions are closely related to contemporary text linguistics and also deal with problems involving psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and semiotics. (3) Papers having, at least in some part, a pronounced historiographic character. These contributions reflect the fact that contemporary Czech linguistic research is firmly anchored in the Prague linguistic tradition. Although the authors' frame of reference is mainly Czech and the current language situation in the Czech Republic, the majority of contributions were intended to have a more general linguistic character and general linguistic validity.