The London School

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The Copenhagen School

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Functional Linguistics: The Prague School

The Prague school practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics and although most of the scholars whom one thinks of as members of the school worked in Prague or at least in Czechoslovakia, the term also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered to the Prague style. The hallmark of Prague linguistics was that it saw language in terms of function, they analysed a given language with a view to showing the respective function played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language. Prague linguistics look at a motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various component were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others. They used the notions ‘phoneme’ and ‘morpheme’ and to go beyond description to explanation, saying not just what language were like but why they were the way they were. One example of functional explanation in Mathesius´s own work concerns he use of terms commonly translated theme andrheme, and the notion which has come to be called Functional Sentence Perspective by recent writers working in the Prague tradition. According to Matheusius , the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly falls into two parts: the theme which refers to something about which the hearer already knows and the rheme, which states some new facts about that given topic. The theme/rheme division will correspond to the syntactic distinction between subject and predicate, or between subject-plus-transitive-verb and object. Many Prague linguists were actively interested in questions of standardizing linguistics usages. The notion of ‘functional onomatology’, which treats the coining of novel vocabulary items as a task which different language solve in characteristically different ways. Trubetzkoy and the Prague school in general were interested in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes i.e the nature of the oppositions between the sequences phonemes that potentially contrast with one another at a given point in a phonological structure, rather than in the syntagmatic relations which determine how phonemes may be organized in a language. Trubetzkoy developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic contrast. In the Principles he established a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology – that is a system which enables us to say what kind of phonology a language has, rather than simply treating, its phonological structure in the take-it-or-leave-it American fashion as a set of isolated facts. Also he distinguished three functions that can be served by a phonological opposition. The obvious functions – that of keeping different words or longer sequences apart – he called the distinctive function, the delimitative function – the oppositions between presence and absence of stress—and the culminative function –the position of the stress. Karl Buhler distinguished between the representation function (i.e that of stating facts), the expressive functions (i.e that of expressing temporary or permanent characteristics of the speaker) and the connotative functions (that influenced the hearer). Another manifestation of the Prague attitude that language is a tool which has a job to do is the fact that members of that School were much preoccupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use. Mathesius , and following him various other members of the Prague School, had the notion that sound changes were to be explained the result of a striving towards a sort of ideal balance or resolution of various conflicting pressures. The Prague School argues for system in diachronic too, and indeed it claims that linguistic change is determined by synchronic état de langue. Martinet was heavily influenced by Prague thinking from an early stage in his career. He set out his theories in the book Économie des ChangementsPhonétiques. The therapeutic view of sound-change is indeed reminiscent of the economists’ doctrine of the invisible hand, according to which the various countervailing forces in an economy tend towards an ideal equilibrium. One of the key concepts in Martinet´s account of sound-change is that of the functional yield of a phonological opposition. The functional yield of an opposition is the amount of work it does in distinguishing utterances which are otherwise alike. Martinet argues, the pronunciation of similar phonemes will overlap and will tend to merge. Roman OsipovichJakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. The most important aspect of Jakobson´s work is his phonological theory. He is interested in thephonemes into their component features rather than in the distribution of phonemes. The essence of Jakobson´s approach to phonology is the notion that there is a relatively simple, orely, universal ‘psychological system’ of sound underlying the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sound observed by the phonetician. For him only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fill to play a linguistically distinctive role; despite surface appearances each of these parameters is of the rigidly two-valued type and precedence. Jakobson substantiate his belief that the phonological universals are determined by ‘deep’ psychological principles rather than by relatively uninteresting facts about oral discussion of synesthetic effects: that is, cases where perception in one sensory mode. One of the characteristics of the Prague approach to language was a readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative ‘systems’, ‘registers’, or ‘styles’ were American Descriptivists tended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system. Prague scholars were particularly interested in the way that a language provides a speaker with a range of speech-styles appropriate to different social settings. This aspect has recently been developed into a rich and sophisticated theory by the American William Labov. Labov´s work is based on recorded interviews with sizable samples of speakers of various categories in some speech-community, the interviews being designed to elicit examples of some linguistic forms –a variable –which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community. The Prague Labov is among the linguists who have taken the social dimension of language most seriously; and they have ended by destroying Saussure’s sharp separation between synchronic and diachronic study. ACTIVITY

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The Study of Language

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