Functional linguistics: the Prague School

The Prague school practised 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 is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered to the Prague style.

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

According to Mathesius, the need of continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts (which may be very unequal in length): the theme, which refers to something about which the hearer already knows (often because it has been discussed in immediately preceding sentences), and the rheme, which states some new fact about that given topic.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the “Prage School” not based in Czechoslovakia.

Trubetzkoyan phonology, like that of the American Descriptivists, gives a central role to the phoneme; but Trubetzkoy, and the Prage School in general were interested primarly in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes.

The language has of course compensated for this loss of phonological distinctions. What has happened is that monomorphemic words have to a very large extent been replaced by compounds of a type, very unusual in European languages, consisting of two synonyms or near-synonyms.

Jakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He represents one of the very few personal links between European and American traditions of linguistics; and his ideas have had much to do with the radical change of direction that has occurred in American linguistics over the last twenty years. He is interested in the analysis of phonemes 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, orderly, universal ‘psychological system’ of sounds underlying the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sounds observed by the phonetician.

The Descriptivists emphasized that language differ unpredictably in the particular phonetic parameters which they utilize distinctively, and in the number of values which they distinguish on parameters which are physically continuous.

For Jakobson, only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role; despite surface appearances each of these parameters is of the rigidly two-valued type, and the system of parameters forms a fixed hierarchy of precedence. Differences between the phonologies of languages are for Jakobson superficial variations on a fixed underlying theme.

For Bloomfield, voicing (say) was distinctive in English and non-distinctive in Mandarin, but the question ‘Is voicing distinctive in language in general?’ would have been wholly meaningless, since any phonetic parameter could be and probably was used distinctively in at least a few languages. For Jakobson and his collaborators, on the other hand, ‘distinctive’ means ‘able to be used distinctively in a human language.

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 form- a variable-which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community.


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