Prague School

Vilem Mathiesus, a Czech Anglicist who studied and taught at the Caroline University of Prague, published in 1911 his first call for a non-historic approach to language study. Around him came into being a circle of like-minded linguistics scholars who began to meet for regular discussion from 1926 onwards, and came to be recognized as the ‘Prague School’. They practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics, and although they were mostly based in Prague and Czechoslovakia, all those who adhere to that style are called followed to the Prague style.

The hallmark of Prague linguistics was that it saw language in terms of function, as they analyzed a given language with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language. This differentiated it from its contemporaries in America, who restricted themselves to the describe language. Prague linguists looked at language seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.

An example of functional explanation in Mathesius’s work concerns his use of the terms theme and rheme: the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts: the theme, something the hearer already knows, and the rheme, which states some new fact about a given topic. The notion of Functional Sentence Perspective shows us how trying to communicate certain constructions are done in different languages depending on their structures. Americans did use similar concepts, but not to the extent of the Prague school.

Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy wrote a book called Principles of Phonology, which represents well the focus of the Prague school on the paradigmatic relations between phonemes, such as the natures of the oppositions between phonemes that potentially contrast with one another at a given point in a phonological structure. What is relevant to our present discussion are the various functions that can be served as a phonological opposition. The obvious function is the distinctive function of keeping different words apart, but it can also have other functions, such as delimitative function or the culminative function. The American tradition thought of all phonological contrasts as distinctive.

The point of these functions is to enable the hearer to work out what sequence of words has been uttered by the speaker. Karl Buhler, distinguished between representation, expressive and conative function. This view, although aprioristic, makes the point that there is more to language than the representation function. The Prague school was preoccupied with the aesthetic and literary aspects of language, unlike the other schools. It served as a point of contact between linguistics and structuralism.

There have been developments of scientific nature that have roots in the Prague School. The therapeutic theory of sound change of Mathesius has the notion that sound changes were to be explained as the result of striving towards a sort of ideal balance of conflicting pressures. This process would never reach a conclusion, since a change that cures an imbalance will inevitably cause tensions elsewhere.

Andre Martinet worked the therapeutic view of sound-change into a sophisticated theory. One of his key concepts is that of the functional yield of a phonological opposition, which is the amount of work it does in distinguishing utterances which are otherwise alike. Martinet argues the pronunciations of similar phonemes will overlap and tend to merge. However, examination of this theory disproves it, as several languages, despite having phonemes with high functional yield, keep using them as different phonemes.

Another theory is that of Jakobson’s phonological universals. His most important contribution to linguistics is his phonological theory that there is a universal psychological system of sound underlying the different kinds of sound. For him, only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role, and differences between phonologies of languages are superficial variations on a fixed underlying theme. The book Preliminaries to speech analysis lists a set of 12 pairs of terms which label the alternative values of what are claimed to be the twelve distinctive features of human speech. Jakobson also published that they’re organized into a hierarchy of relative priority, which notes how children acquire them in a specific order. The problem with his work is that it’s highly anecdotal, and are hard to support with hard, scientific data.

One of the characteristics of the Prague approach was a readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative styles, instead of a single unitary system. Because of the functional approach, the Prague scholars were particularly interested in the way language provides a speaker with a range of speech-styles appropriate to different social settings. William Labov studied these variables, and noted how people are acutely sensitive to the correlations between linguistic and social variables.

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