Prague school

Functional linguistics: the Prague School

In this chapter with a summary I going to mentions some ones scholars that working in Prague school and theirs contributions and how influence in others by realized the investigation and advantages in the linguistics also we can see how this language in the time and with those differences between words are used in the world.

Vilém Mathesius (1882-1945) a Czech University of Prague, he published his first call for a new, non.historial approaches to language study a circle of like-minded linguistic scholars “”Prague School”. The Prague School practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics; the term is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered into the Prague style. They analyzed a given language with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language.

Prague linguistics looked as one might look at motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.

They used the notions phoneme and morpheme, for instance; but they tried to go beyond description to explanation, saying not just what languages were like buy why they were the way they were.

American linguistics restricted them.

Matchesius´s own which has come to be called Functional Sentence perspective.

Mathesius a sentence will commonly fall into parts: the theme and the rheme, these divisions will correspond to the syntactic distinction between subject and predicate, or between subject-plus-transitive-verb and object.

Descriptivist since these explanations make unavoidable use of concepts which do not correspond to observables and are therefore illegitimate by behaviorist standards.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the Prague school not based in Csechoslovakia. Trubetzkoy began at an early age to study Finno-Ugric and Caucasuan folklore and philology; he was a student of Indo-European linguistics.

Trubetzkoy´s ideas through the book, Principles of Phonology, which he struggled to finish in his last weeks of life.

He an the Prague School were interested in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes, he developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic contrast: he distinguished between privative oppositions, gradual opposition and equipollent oppositions.

Trubetzkoy, in the Principles, establishes a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology - 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.

The obvious function he called distinctive function is that of keeping different words or longer sequences apart.

Delimitative function, it helps the hearer locate word-boundaries in the speech signal.

Culminate function: there is, very roughly speaking and ignoring a few critics such as a and the.

In the American tradition there is no room for such statements. The Descriptivist’s thought of all phonological contrasts as “distinctive”.

Buhler (1934) distinguished between the representation function, the expressive function, and the co native function; distinctions between allophones of a given phoneme.

Another manifestation of the Prague is that language is tool which has a job to do the fact that members of that School were much preoccupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use.

Mathesius changes were to be explained as the result of various conflicting pressures; for instance, the need for a language to have a large variety of phonetic shapes available to keep its words distinct conflicts with the need for speech to be comprehensible despite inevitably inexact pronunciation.

Frenchman, Andre Martiner, the scholar who has done most to turn the therapeutic view of sound change into  an explicit, sophisticated theory, he describe the chief proponent of mainstream Prague ideas, the book, Economie des Changements Phonetiques.

The key concepts in Martiner account is that of the functional yield of a phonological opposition. The functional yeld of phonological oppositions 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.

King and Wang have tested the hypothesis by evolving explicit, numerical measures of functional wields and comparing the known histories of certain languages with the predictions which follows from these statics.

Roman Osipovich Jakobson is a scholar of Russian origins (1920), he was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistics Circle.

He represents one of the very few personal links between European and American traditions of linguistics. Jacobson’s work is his phonological theory, but his views represents a special development which takes to their logical extreme ideas that are found only briefly adumbrated in the work of Trubetzkoy and other members of the School.

The approach of Jakobson is the notion that there is a relatively simple, universal psychological system of sounds underlying the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sounds observed by the phonetician.

Jakobson and his collaborates, distinctive means is able to be used distinctively in a human language will actually make use of almost all the twelve features.

An important part of the theory is that certain physically quite distinct articulator parameters are psychologically equivalent, as one might say.

Flat represents interchangeably each of the following articulatory parameter values; pharyngalization: and retroflex articulation.

Jakobson makes the point, to begin with, that a study of children´s acquisition of language shows that the various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random order.

Jakobson dismisses with some scorn, as “completely untenable”, such alternative explanations for synaesthetic associations.

Jacobson’s statements about aphasia also seem to be based on very few cases. Preliminaries to Speech Analysis consist essentially of a series of ex cathedra pronouncements about the identity by Jacobson’s twelve features.

One of the characteristic of the Prague approach to language was a readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative system, registers, or styles, where American Descriptive tended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system.

Prague scholars were interred in the way a range of speech-styles appropriate to different social setting. This aspect has recently been developed into a rich and sophisticated theory by the American William Labov 1970, he recorded interviews with sizable samples, the interviews being designed to elicit examples of some linguistics form- a variable – which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community.

Labov´s work is the subtlety, consistency and mathematical it reveals in speakers ‘use of statistical linguistic variables and heares´reactions to them.