This lecture describes about Prague School.

1. 13. The Prague School
Lecture No. 13
Zafar Ullah,
zafarullah76@gmail.com

2. Introduction
• Prague is the capital and the largest city in the
Czech Republic, the 13th largest city in the
European Union and the historical capital of
Bohemia.
• The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle
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.
• Café Derby
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3. Prague School and Linguistics
• Language study synchronic or diachronic
• Study of language through relationship with
existing elements.
• Language is a tool for performing various
functions in a society.
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4. Three Functions of a Language
• Karl Buhler
• i. Cognitive function (transfer factual info)
• ii. Expressive function (mood, attitude)
• iii. Conative function (influences the addresser)
(the mental faculty of purpose, desire, or will to
perform an action)
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5. Contributions of Prague School
• It saw language in terms of function.
• They analyzed language with a view of
showing the functions played by the
different components.
• They looked in languages and explanation
to why languages were the way they
were.
• Use of terms theme and rheme.
• It was interested in standarizing linguistic
usage. 5

6. Influence
• The Prague School has had a significant
continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics.
After the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the
circle was disbanded in 1952, but the Prague
School continued as a major force in linguistic
functionalism. The Prague structuralists also had
a significant influence on structuralist film theory,
especially through the introduction of
the ostensive sign (explain with examples and
gestures).
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7. Cont…
• Today, the Prague linguistic circle aims to
contribute to the knowledge of language and
related sign systems according to functionally
structural principles.
• To this end, it organizes regular meetings with
lectures and debates, publishes professional
publications, and organizes international
meetings
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8. VILÉM MATHESIUS
• Vilém Mathesius (1882-1945) was a
Czech Anglicist who studied and taught at
the Caroline University of Prague.
• In 1911, Matheusius published his first
call for a new, non-historical approach to
language study.
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9. Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich
Trubetzkoy
• Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-
1938) was one of the members of the “Prague
School” not based in Czechoslovakia.
• Trubetzkoyan phonology gives a central role to
the phoneme; he was a student of Indo European
linguistics.
• In the Principles, establishes a rather
sophisticated system of phonological typology, a
system which enables us to say what kind of
phonology a language has.
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10. Roman Jakobson
• Roman Osipovich Jakobson (1896) was a
Russian scholar. From the 1920s onwards, he
studied and taught in Prague , and moved to a
chair in the university of Brno.
• Jakobson’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. The most
important aspect of Jakobson’s work is his
phonological theory. 10

11. Cont…
• The articulatory phonetics lesson is that human
vocal anatomy provides a very large range of
different phonetic parameters
• At Jacobson’s view, only a small group of
phonetic parameters seem to play a linguistically
distinctive role.
• Jacobson published a book and he described the
twelve distinctive features called Preliminaries to
Speech Analysis (1952).
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