Za vědu o vývoji: Jan Mukařovský a Antoine Meillet

This article examines the possible influence of Antoine Meillet’s thinking on the Prague Linguistic Circle, especially on Jan Mukařovský. Based on a comparison of Jan Mukařovský’s studies from the 1930s and selected works by Antoine Meillet, we find three intersecting topics: the rhetoric of the new science, the sociological conception of linguistics and in particular the concept of general linguistics as a science of the laws of development. We show that Meillet’s and Mukařovský’s sociological conception of language and artwork leads in the final instance to a reference to a certain material basis for the norms under examination.