prague school

• The Prague School or Prague linguistic Circle was a school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius.

• It was an influential group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation during the years 1928–1939.

In the field of linguistics , the Prague scholars were greatly influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure and by his incipient structuralism.

• 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 in a language is seen as composed of a number of contrasting articulatory and acoustic features, and any two sounds of a language that are perceived as being distinct will have at least one feature contrast in their compositions.

Combination of structuralism and functionalism

Structuralism, in cultural anthropology, the school of thought developed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in which cultures, viewed as systems, are analyzed in terms of the structural relations among their elements.

Functionalism, in linguistics, the approach to language study that is concerned with the functions performed by language, primarily in terms of cognition (relating information), expression (indicating mood), and conation (exerting influence).

Phonological contributions

The Prague school was best known for its work on phonology. Unlike the American phonologists, Trubetskoy and his followers did not take the phoneme to be the minimal unit of analysis. Instead, they defined phonemes as sets of distinctive features. For example, in English, /b/ differs from /p/ in the same way that /d/ differs from /t/ and /g/ from /k/. Just how they differ in terms of their articulation is a complex question.

For simplicity, it may be said that there is just one feature, the presence of which distinguishes /b/, /d/, and /g/ from /p/, /t/, and /k/, and that this feature is voicing (vibration of the vocal cords). . Each phoneme, then, is composed of a number of articulatory features and is distinguished by the presence or absence of at least one feature from every other phoneme in the language. The distinctive function of phonemes, which depends upon and supports the principle of the duality of structure, can be related to the cognitive function of language.

Vilém Mathesius.

Nikolai Trubetskoy.

Roman Jakobson.

Vilém Mathesius ( 3 August 1882 – 12 April 1945) was a Czech linguist, literary historian and co-founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He is considered one of the founders of structural functionalism in linguistics.

In linguistics, Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory describing the information structure of the sentence and language communication in general.

theme and rheme

The Functional Sentence Perspective has two parts: the theme and the rheme.The topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic.

In other words, the theme refers to what is already known, while the rheme conveys new information.

Roman Jakobson

• Roman Jakobson,was a Russian-American linguist and literary theorist.

• A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology.

The communication functions

Influenced by the Organon-Model by Karl Bühler, Jakobson distinguishes six communication functions, each associated with a dimension or factor of the communication process [Elements from Bühler's theory appear in the diagram below in yellow and pink, Jakobson's elaborations in blue]:

Functions of language

• Referential (: contextual information)
• Aesthetic/poetic (: auto-reflection)
• Emotive (: self-expression)
• Conative (: vocative or imperative addressing of receiver)
• Phatic (: checking channel working)
• Metalingual (: checking code working)

prince Nikolai Trubetskoy.

Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy 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.

Morphophonology is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (minimal meaningful units) when they combine to form words.

contributions

Trubetzkoy's chief contributions to linguistics lie in the domain of phonology, in particular in analyses of the phonological systems of individual languages and in the search for general and universal phonological laws. In his book (Principles of Phonology) he defined the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from phonetics.

Theory of markedness

In linguistics , markedness is the state of standing out as unusual or divergent in comparison to a more common or regular form. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as unmarked; the other, secondary one is marked. In other words, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms.

Markedness can apply to, among others, phonological, grammatical, and semantic oppositions, defining them in terms of marked and unmarked oppositions, such as honest (unmarked) vs. dishonest (marked). Marking may be purely semantic, or may be realized as extra morphology. The term derives from the marking of a grammatical role with a suffix or another element, and has been extended to situations where there is no morphological distinction.

Thus, a morphologically negative word form is marked as opposed to a positive one: happy/unhappy, honest/dishonest, fair/unfair, clean/unclean and so forth. Similarly, unaffixed masculine or singular forms are taken to be unmarked in contrast to affixed feminine or plural forms: lion/lioness, host/hostess, automobile/automobiles, child/children. An unmarked form is also a default form. For example, the unmarked lion can refer to a male or female, while lioness is marked because it can refer only to females.

Prague Linguistic Circle brought new approaches and new methods in studying language . It emphasized two basic terms : the linguistic sign and communication and contributed to the development of linguistics and of the study of language.

The Prague's school central tenet was that language is a coherent system fulfilling a range of " functions" in society.