FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS: THE PRAGUE SCHOOL

Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius

It included among its most prominent members the Russian linguist Nikolay Trubetskoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson; the school was most active during the 1920s and ’30s.

Linguists of the Prague school stress the function of elements within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts, and they have distinguished themselves in the study of sound systems. They developed distinctive-feature analysis of sounds; by this analysis, each distinctive sound ...

Trubetzkoy

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (Russian; Moscow, April 16, 1890 - Vienna, June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology.

Trubetzkoy, like other members of the Prague School, was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message.

In analysing the function of speech Trubetzkoy followed his Viennese philosopher collage Karl Bühler, who distinguish between the representation of function(that stating facts), the expressive function (that of expressing temporary or permanent characteristics of the speaker), and the conative function (that of influencing the hearer


Trubetzkoy shows that Bühler´s analysis can be applied in phonology.

A phonetic opposition which fulfils the representation function will normally be a phonetic contrast; but distinctions between the allophones of a given phoneme, where the choice is not determinated by the phonemic environment, often play an expressive or conative role.
A manifestation of Prague attitude that language is a tool which has a job to do the fact that members of that School were much preocupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use.

In Chinese, morphemes and syllables are co-terminous, but modern Mandarin has so few phonologically distinct syllables that on averages each syllable is ambiguous as between three or four etymologically distinct morphemes in current use.

Roman Jakobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson (October 11, 1896, Moscow – July 18, 1982, Boston) is a scholar of Russian origin; he took his first degree, in Oriental languages, at Moscow University

As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century.

Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology. 

He went on to apply the same techniques of analysis to syntax and morphology, and controversially proposed that they be extended to semantics (the study of meaning in language).

Jakobson is a phonological Tory. For him, only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role.

The system of parameters forms a fixed hierarchy of precedence. The details of the invariant system are not determined by mundane considerations such as vocal-tract anatomy or the need for easily perceived distinctions, but by much “deeper” principles having to do with innate features of the human mind.

Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: List 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.

Distinctive 

Bloomfield: Voicing (say) was distinctive in English and non-distinctive in Mundarin.

Jakobson: “Distinctive” means “able to be used distinctively in a human language”.

The theory is the cetain physically quite distinct articulatory parameters are “psychologically equivalent”, as one might say. For example; “FLAT” : represents interchangeably each of the following articulatory parameter-value: lip-rounding, pharyngalization and retroflex articulation.

CHILDREN’S ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE

Among consonants, the distinction between labial and alveolar stops appears before the distinction between alveolars and velars


All children go through a stage at which, for example, CAT is pronounced as something like TAT.


Stops are acquired before fricatives. 

In order to substantiate his belief that the phonological universals he discusses are determined by “deep” psychological principles rather than by relatiely uninteresting facts about oral anatomy or the like, Jakobson devotes considerable space to discussion of synaesthetic effects

Cases where perceptions in one sensory mode (in this case, speech-sound) correlate with perceptions in another mode (Jakobson considers mainly associations of sounds with colours).

One of the claims that is important for Jakobson is that synaesthetic subjects tend to perceive vowels as coloured but consonants as colourless – black, white or grey.

Readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative “systems”, “registers” or “styles”; where American Descriptivists rended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system.

Consider, as a very crude example of the problem, the treatment of non-naturalized foreign loan-words.

Nasal vowels are not usual in English, so a Descriptivist would find it difficult to justify the omission of /Ʒ/ from a phonemic analysis of English

ROMAN JAKOBSON 

Functions of Language