“Functional linguistic: the Prague School”

“Functional linguistic: the Prague School”

Saussure´s lectures on synchronic linguistics were given in 1911, and that year, also saw the publication of Boas’s Handbook; coincidentally, it was in 1911 too that Mathesius published his first call for a new, non-historical approach to language study (Mathesius 1911).

Around Mathesius there came into being a circle of like-minded linguistic scholars, who began to meet for regular discussion from 1926 onwards, and came to be recognized as “the prague  school”.

The Prague School practiced a special style od synchronic linguistic, and although most of the scholars whom one thinks of as members of the school worked in Prague or at  least Czechoslovakia, the term is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered to the Prague style.

As long as they were describing the strucrure of a language, the practice of the Pargue School was not very different from that of their contemporaries, 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 but why they were the way they were.

American linguistic restricted themselves and still restrict themselves to description.

According to Mathesius, the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts, the theme which refrers to something about which the immediately preceding sentences, and the rheme, so that the peg may be established in the hearer´s mind bedore anything new has to be hung on it.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that the notion of functional sentence perspective was wholly unknow in American linguistic, some of the descriptivists did use the terms topic and comment in much the same way as Mathesius theme and rheme.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the Prague School not based I Czechislovakia. He belonged to a scholarly family of the Russian nobility: his father had been a professor of philosophy and rector of Moscow University.

Troubetzkoy was a member of an aristocratic family with a long and renowned intellectual tradition. His interest in ethnography and folklore was present since adolescence. At the age of fifteen, he published his first article in Ethnological Society in Moscow.Troubetzkoy was in its infancy essentially ethnological training, with special relevance of Russian folklore, Caucasian and Finno-Ugric. The influence of this discipline is observed in its interpretation of language as a product closely related to religion, folklore and culture in general.

In 1908 he was admitted to the philological-historical school of the University of Moscow. During this period, he trained in the study of Indo-European languages. Like other linguists of the time, made a stay in Germany during the years 1913-1914. In 1916, he taught Sanskrit at the University of Moscow, which temporarily abandoned in 1917 for health reasons. In the Caucasus surprised by the Bolshevik uprising.

At this time, he began a long exile to Trubetzkoy and a host of Russian aristocrats and intellectuals. After two years of incessant pilgrimage in Russia, he went to Constantinople (1920), where they remained for a limited period of time and left the city of Sofia, during the 1920 and 1922, Trubetzkoy taught at the University of this city. From 1922, until his death in 1938, he taught at the University of Vienna.

The most emblematic work of this author, Principles of Phonology (1939), published after his death and does, therefore, the latest revisions. Trubetzkoy projected increase bibliographical notes and putting a prologue with a dedication to Roman Jakobson, Russian colleague with whom she had a close academic relationship since 1920.

This book has had a significant impact on subsequent phonological studies. His conception of phonology was conceived within the linguistic structuralism and was very well received by the Prague Circle.Following Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy defended the disciplinary autonomy of Phonetics and Phonology, because the first was concerned with the sounds of speech and the second sound of the language. The author understood also that phonology was to address not only the representative function of the sounds, but its expressive function (used to characterize the speaker) and its appellate function (used to trigger certain feelings in the listener).

The book consists of two essential parts. The first is devoted to the study of phonetic distinctive feature, which covers the fundamental concepts of phonology, such as defining minimum phoneme or phonological unit that has a distinctive value, for a change of this unit for another in the same phonetic context implies a change of meaning: eg / duck / y / cat /; phonetic variants, which have an optional value, since a change of a variant of another does not entail any change in the meaning of the word or sequence ; or archiphoneme, distinct sets of characteristics that are common to two phonemes in a position of neutralization.

The second part of the book is devoted to the study of phonics defined function or differentiation between complex phonic correspond to different units of meaning or phonic sememes by specific brands.