Jan Firbas

Born in Brno, in then Czechoslovakia, he studied English, German and philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University.

Persecution from the communist government and the fact that he came from an old Protestant family and refused to renounce his belief significantly delayed his academic career.

Firbas developed a theory of Information Structure called Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), inspired by the work of Vilém Mathesius.

[2] He wrote more than 100 papers on the subject[3] and published a comprehensive account of his approach to information structure of language as a monograph in 1992.

[4] Firbas's most diligent disciple was Aleš Svoboda, with whom he closely collaborated especially in the 1970s and 1980s on the development and refinement of the key concepts in the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective.