Prague School summary

PRINCIPAL IDEAS ABOUT THE PRAGUE SCHOOL

The hallmark of Prague School linguistics was that it saw language in terms of function. I mean by this not merely that members of the Prague School thought of language as a whole as serving a purpose, which is a truism that would hardly differentiate them from others, but they analysed a given language with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language.

The analyst seems to take much the same attitude to the linguistic structure as one might take to a work of art, in that it does not usually occur to him to a particular element and ask ''What's that for?''.

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

'Functional Sentence Perspective' by recent writers working in the Prague tradition (or, at least , many) sentences are uttered in order to give the hearer some information.

According to Mathesius, the need for 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 the given topic.

A related point is that many Prague linguistics were actively interested in questions of standardizing linguistics usage.

There have been certain developments whose roots lie in Prague School thought but which have come to be fairly clearly scientific in their nature. The first of these may be called the therapeutic theory of sound-change.

The Prague School argues  for system in diachronic too, and indeed it claims that linguistic change is determined by, as well determining, synchronic état de language.

Jakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He spent much of the Second World War at the Ecole Nobre des Hautes Études which was established in New York City as home for refugee scholars from Europe. Jakobson's intellectual interests are broad and reflect those of Prague School as a whole; he has written a great deal , for instance, on the structuralism approach to literature.

One of the characteristics of the Prague approach to language was readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative 'systems', 'registers' , or 'styles', where American Descriptivists tended to insist on a trating a language as a simple unitary system.

A Prague linguist would be ready, indeed eager, to say that English has a system of native phonemes which excludes even though that sound may occur in a subsidiary stock of borrowed words ,and that if the phonology of rapid English differs their respective from that English spoken slowly then their respective grammars should be kept distinct rather than merged together.

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.

Saussure stressed the social nature of language and he insisted that linguistics as a social science must ignore historical data because for the speaker ,the history of this language does not exist- a point seemed undeniable. The Prague School, and now Labov are among the linguistics who have taken the social dimension of language most seriously ;and they have ended by destroying Saussure0s sharp separation between synchronic and diachronic study.