The article treats of the discussion of democracy in the Czech intellectual context of the first half of the 20th century. Its starting point is the thesis that the nature of this discussion is determined by two clearly defined types of approach. One of them understood democracy as the concerning the general level which alone enabled free discussion and the dignified life of citizens (E. Beneš, E. Rádl, F. X. Šalda, F. Peroutka, K. Čapek and others). The second approach is an attempt to found democratic social-political practice on reflected philosophical theory. This conception is represented by T.G. Masaryk and J.L. Fischer. Masaryk is the “ontotheologian” of democracy which is, for him, an expression of the active presence of Providence in history. J. L. Fischer is the “onto-epistemologist” of democracy. He understands democracy as the realisation of the hierarchical Order of Reality, interpreted along the lines of structural functionalism. For Masaryk a crisis of democracy is ex definitione impossible, for Fischer it is a real threat because “pathological structures”. In both cases, however, there is an attempt to legitimise everyday reality by Transcendence.
ForFun is a database of linguistic forms and their syntactic functions built with the use of the multi-layer annotated corpora of Czech, the Prague Dependency Treebanks. The purpose of the Prague Database of Forms and Functions (ForFun) is to help the linguists to study the form-function relation, which we assume to be one of the principal tasks of both theoretical linguistics and natural language processing.
A prototypical question to be asked is "What purposes does a preposition 'po' serve for" or "What are the linguistic means in the sentence that can express the meaning 'a destination of an action'?". There are almost 1500 distinct forms (besides the 'po' preposition) and 65 distinct functions (besides the 'destination').