Functional Linguistics: the Prague School

Functional Linguistics: the Prague School

Sampson Geoffrey

The Prague School practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics, and although most of the scholars whom one thinks of has a members of the school worked in Prague or at least in Czechoslovakia.   

The hallmark of Prague linguistics was that it saw the language in terms of function.

One fairly straightforward example of functional  explanation in Mathesius´s own concerns his use of terms of commonly translated theme and rheme, and the notion which has come to be called “functional Sentence Perspective ”  by recent writers working in the Prague tradition.  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 that given topic. Unless certain special effects are aimed at, theme will preced rheme, so that the peg may be established in the hearer´s mind before anything new has to be hung on it. The theory of theme and rheme by no mean exhausts Mathesius’s contributions to the functional view of grammar; given more space, I might have included a discussion of his notion of “functional onomatology”, which treats the coining of novel vocabulary items as a task which different  languages solve in characteristically different ways.

Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoyan was one of the members of the Prague School not based in Czechoslovakia. Trubetzkoyan phonology, like that of the American Descriptivists, gives a central role to the phoneme; but Trubetzkoyan and the Prague school in general (as I have  suggested is characteristic of the European style of linguistics), were interested primarily in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes.

Trubetzkoyan phonology, gives a central role to the phoneme; he developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic contrast; he distinguished between private oppositions, gradual oppositions and equipollent oppositions. Trubetzkoy’s “archiphoneme” idea is useful in dissolving pseudoproblems. Trubetzkoy, in the Principles, establishes a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology –that is, a system which enables us to say what kind of phonological structure in the take-it-or-leave-it American fashion as a set of isolated facts.

The distinctive function, this is by no means the only function that a phonological opposition may serve, is the function of keeping different words or longer sequences apart.

Delimitative function: it helps the hearer locate word-boundaries in the speech signal, which is something he needs to do if he is to make sense of what he hears.

Culminative function: there is, very roughly speaking and ignoring a few “clitics” such as a and the, one and only one main stress per word in English.

Descriptive would have said either that it never keeps different words apart or is there-fore to be ignored as non-phonemic.

Trubetzkoy, was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message. A phonetic opposition which fulfils the representation function will normally be a phonemic contrast.

In American English, on the other hand, vowel duration has no “distinctive” function and is always free to vary, and length is used to engage the emotions of the hearers. For a Descriptivist, alternation between allophones of a phoneme is either phonologically determined or else is said to be in “free variation”.

Many American linguists, both Descriptivists and, even more so, those of the modern Chomskyan school. This aspect of Prague School thought lies somewhat outside the purview of the present book

Bloomfieldians and Chomskyans disagree radically about the nature of science, but they are united in wanting to place linguistics firmly on the science side of the arts/science divide.

The first of these is what may be called the therapeutic theory of sound-change, the need for a language to have a large variety of phonetic shapes available to keep its words distinct conflicts with the need for speech to be comprehensible despite inevitably inexact pronunciation.

It is worth nothing that this view of sound-change is somewhat at odds with Saussure’s approach to linguistics, and contrasted synchronic linguistics, as the study of a system in which the various elements derive their values from their mutual relationships.

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

The Frenchman, André Martinet is the scholar who has done most to turn the therapeutic view of sound-change into an explicit, sophisticated theory. His book, has theories of diachronic phonology most fully is significantly entitled Economic des Changements Phonétiques (1955).

Despite the attraction and plausibility of this hypothesis about sound-change, further examination does not seem to have borne it out. Unless we interpreter Martinet as saying merely that a language will somehow maintain its usability as a means of communication, then Mandarin must surely refute him. Pheraps this obituary for Martinet’s theory of sound-change is premature; one can think of ways in which some sort of rearguard action might be mounted in its defense.

Roman Osipovich Jakobson is a scholar Russian origin; he took his first degree, in Oriental languages, at Moscow University. From the early 1920s onwards he studied and taught in Prague, and moved to a chair at the university of Brno in remaining there until the Nazi occupation forced him to leave. Jakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

Jackobson's intellectual interests are broad and reflect those of the Prague School as a whole; he has written a great deal, for instance, on the structuralist approach to literature.  However, in terms of influence on the discipline of linguistics, by far the most important aspect of Jakobson's work is his phonological theory.

One of the lessons of articulatory phonetics is that human vocal anatomy provides a very large range of different phonetic parameters, far more, probably, than any individual language uses distinctively. In English, for instance, the various alternative airstream mechanisms play no part whatsoever in the phonological system - all our sounds are made with air forced out of the lungs by the respiratory muscles; and the wide range of possible vocal-chord actions are only marginally exploited, for the simple voiced/voiceless distinction and for the use of pitch matters in English phonology. Furthermore, parameters differ considerably in the number of alternative values they may take.

 Nasality, arguably, is a simple binary choice; the soft palate is either raised of lowered, and thus a sound is either oral or nasal. The open/close and front/back parameters for tongue position, on the other hand, represent continuous ranges of values: the highest point of the tongue may be anywhere between the highest point of the tongue may be anywhere between the highest and lowest, furthest front and furthest back positions which are anatomically possible. The system of cardinal vowels divides up these continua in a discrete fashion: thus it provides for just four equidistant degrees of vowel aperture; but this is simply a convention invented for ease of description, and the cardinal parameter-value 'half close' is no more 'special' phonetically as compared to adjacent non-cardinal values than the line '54 degrees North' is special geographically as compared to the territory phonetician would be much  more inclined to say that parameters which appear prima facie discrete are really continuous rather than vice versa.

Jakobson, on the other hand, is a phonological theory. For him, only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive ; despise surface appearances the system, of parameters forms a fixed hierarchy of precedence,. Furthermore, the details of the invariant system are not determined by mundane considerations such as vocal-tract anatomy or the need for easily perceived distinctions.

The notion that the universal distinctive features are organized into an innate hierarchy of relative importance or priority appears in a book which Jakobson published in the period between leaving Czechoslovakia and arriving in America. He makes the point, to begin with, that a various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random order. Thus, among consonants, the distinction between labial and alveolar stops appears before the distinction between alveolar and velars: all children go through a stage at which.

He discusses are determined by “deep” psychological principles rather than by relatively uninteresting facts about oral anatomy or the like, he devotes considerable space o discussion of synaesthetic effects. One of the claims that is important for Jakobson is hat synaesthetic subjects tend to perceive vowels as coloured bu consonants as colourless –black, white or grey. The nature of Jakobson’s evidence being what it is, this individual observation goes quite a long way towards refuting his claims about universals of sound-synaesthesia.

Preliminaries to Speech Analysis consists essentially of a series of ex cathedra pronouncements about the identity of Jakobson’s twelve features. Jakobson’s writings never, by their tone or by their content, encourage the reader to regard the statements contained in them as open to debate or testing.

One of the characteristics of the Prague approach to language was a readiness to acknowledge that 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.

Labov’s work is based on recorder interviews with sizable samples of speakers of various categories in some speech-community, the interviews being designed to elicit examples of some linguistic form –a variable –which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community.

Dialectal continuum, there is nothing particularly in the finding that speakers are familiar with a variety of speech-styles, of course, but many of us had-supposed that such knowledge was patchy and largely inaccurate. Furthermore, when we examine the age factor it emerges that historical change is fuelled by social variation.

Saussure stressed the social nature of language, and he insisted that linguistics as a social science must ignore historical data because the history of his language does not exist –a point that seemed undeniable.