the prague school of thought

1. The Prague school
of thought
By Noreen Zafar
9291

3. History of prague school
• Its an influential group of linguists , philosophers an d literary critics
.
• Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis
and the theory of standard language during the year 1928-1939.
• This circle included Roman Jakobson ,Nikolie Trubetzkoy as the
famous czech literary scholars and Vilem Methisus was the first
president of this school until is death in 1945.
• The circle’s English translations were published by czech linguist
Joseph Vachek in several collections and also in 1929 the circle
launched a journal which had the functional credo.
• The world war II brought an end to it.

4. Combination of structuralism and
functionalism
• Every component of a language for example
phoneme,morpheme,word and sentences, exist to fullfill a specefic
function
• And in structuralism;The context ,not just the components is what is
important.
• Karl Buhler presented three kinds of functions:
• 1:The cognitive function : refers to language employment for the
transmission of factual information.
• 2:The expressive function: The indication of he mood or attitude of
the speaker or writer.
• 3:The conative function: is used for influencing the person or for
bringing about some practical effect.
• The functional distinction of the cogntive and the expressive aspects
of language was applied by prague school lingists in their work on
stylistics and literary criticism.

5. Functional Sentence Perspective
(FSP)
• Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory of
linguistic analysis which refers to an analysis of
utterances (or texts) in terms of the information
they contain. The principle is that the role of each
utterance part is evaluated for its semantic
contribution to the whole.

6. Phonology and phonological
oppositions
• Trubetzkoy , Russian linguist
Principles of Phonology (1939)
• Phonetics belonged to parole whereas phonology
belonged to langue.
• “Phoneme” is an abstract unit of the sound system as
distinct from the sounds actually produced.
• In classifying distinctive features, Trubetzkoy proposed
three criteria: (1) their relation to the whole contrastive
system; (2) relations between the opposing elements;
and (3) their power of discrimination.

7. Trubetzkoy’s contribution
• Trubetzkoy’s contributions to phonological theory
concern four aspects. First, he showed distinctive
functions of speech sounds and gave an accurate
definition for the phoneme. Second, by making
distinctions between phonetics and phonology, and
between stylistic phonology and phonology, he defined
the sphere of phonological studies. Third, by studying the
syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations between
phonemes, he revealed the interdependent relations
between phonemes. Finally, he put forward a set of
methodologies for phonological studies, such as the
method of extracting phonemes and the method of
studying phonological combinations.

8. Major concepts
• Theme – the point of departure of a sentence,
which is equally present to the speaker and
hearer;
• Rheme -- the goal of discourse which presents
the very information that is to be imparted to
the hearer;
• Known/ given information -- information that is
not new to the reader or hearer;
• New information -- what is to be transmitted to
the reader or hearer.

9. • Therefore the subject-predicate distinction is not always the
same as theme-rheme distinction.
• Sally stands on the table.
subject predicate
theme rheme
• On the table stands Sally.
predicate subject
theme rheme

10. Jakobson
• 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
• Jakobson became a pivotal figure in the adaptation of
structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics,
including philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory.
his development of the approach pioneered
by Ferdinand de Saussure, known as "structuralism",
became a major post-war intellectual movement in
Europe and the United States.

11. • Jakobson extended the concept of grammatical meanings
in which the marked elements announces the existence
if some meaning. While the unmarked element does not
announces the existence.
• Jakobson described language by saying that every single
constiuent of a linguistic systems built on our opposition
of two logical contradictories; markedness (the presence
of an attribute)in contrary to its absence.(unmarkedness)

12. Markedness
• Markedness in phonology.
• /b/ (marked)
• /p/ (unmarked)
• Markedness in morphology.
• Jumped (marked)
• Jump (unmarked)
• Markedness vocabulary
• Lion (unmarked)
• Lioness (marked)
• Brotherhood (unmarked)
• Sisterhood (marked)

13. CONCLUSION
The general approach in the study of language for the
prague school can be described as the combination of
structuralism and functionalism.
In addition, synchronic and dychronic approaches are seen
as interconnected and influencing each other.
They regard language as a system of a subsystems, each of
which has its own problems.but they are never isolated for
they are the part of a larger whole.
As such a language is never in state of equillibrium but
rather
has many deviations. These deviations allow the language
to develop and function as a linguistic system.