Copenhagen School

Activity 2

http://www.ahorcado.net/ahorcados.php?id=511a697456ed3

Functional Linguistics: The Prague School

The Prague School

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Traditional Philology, originated independently with Saussure in Switzerland and Boas in the USA.

•A third impulse in the same direction came from Vilém Mathesius.

•Around Mathesius there came into beign a crcle of like-minded linguistic scholars.

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The hallmark of Prague linguistics was that it saw language in terms of function, they thought of language as a whole, as serving a purpose.

•This differentiated the Prague School sharply from their contemporaries, the American Descriptivists.

•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.

 

•As long as they were describing the structure of a language, the practice of the Prague School was not very different from that of their contemporaries.

Mathesius Theory

•Mathesius’s own work concerns his use of terms commonly translated theme and rheme, and the notion which has come to be called Functional Sentence Perspective by recent weiters working on the Prague Tradition.

•According to Mathesius, the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts:   

•The theme, which refers to something about which the hearer already knows.

•The rheme, which states some new fact about the topic.

Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy

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“Principles of Phonology”

•Descriptivists, give a central role to the phoneme; but Trubetzkoy, and the Prague School in general were interested primarily in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes.

• •Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition. The obvious function. That of keeping different words or longer sequences apart- he called the distinctive function.

The Prague School

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The Prague School, was not interested in questions of methodology.

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•There have been certan developments whose roots lie in Prague School thought but whch have come to be fairly clearly scientific in the nature; it happens that in each case the conversion into a fully fledged empirical theory took place away from Prague.

•The first theory, is called the therapeutic theory of sound-change.

•Mathesius had the notion that sound changes were to be explained as the result of a striving towards pressures.

André Martinet

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Économie des Changements Phonétiques (1955)

•The scholar who has done most to turn the theraputic view of sound-change into an explicit, sophisticated theory is the Frenchman, André Martinet.

•One of the key concept in Martinet’s account of sound-change, is that of the functional yield of a phonological opposition. The Functional yield of opposition I, to put it simply, the amount of work it does in distinguishing utterances which are otherwise alike.

• Roman Osipovich Jakobson.

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Born in 1896, of Rusian origen.

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•Studied and taught in Prague.

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•One of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

•Taught at Harvard and MIT.

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•His interests are broad and reflect the Prague School as a whole.

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•Structuralist approach to literature.

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•Member of the Prague School.

•He was interested  in the analysis of phonemes into their component features rather than in the distribution of phonemes.

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•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 sound observed by the phonetician.

•Jakobson was a phonological Tory.

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•Only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role.

Preliminaries to Speech Analysis

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Jakobson, Fant and Halle.

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•Lists a set of twelve pairs of terms which label the alternative values of what are claimed to be the twelve ‘distinctive features’ of all human speech.

•The universal distinctive features are organized into an innate of relative importance or priority.

•A given language might include a range of alternative ‘systems’, ‘registers’, or ‘styles’, where American Descriptivists tended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system.

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•The problem: the treatment of non- naturalized foreign loan-words.

Activity

1. Greek philosophers who made major contributions to the study of language.
2.  They claimed that language  change is regular.
3. In which century the emphasis shifted form language change to language description.
4. He claimed that all language items are linterlinked.
5. Kind of grammar which consists of a set of statements which specify which sequences of languages are possible and which impossible.

The Study of Linguistics