Prague linguists looked at languages as one might look at a motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.
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| Nikolai Trubetzkoy |
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the “Prage School” not based in Czechoslovakia.
Trubetzkoyan phonology, like that of the American Descriptivists, gives a central role to the phoneme; but Trubetzkoy, and the Prage School in general were interested primarly in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes.
Trubetzkoy developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of the phonemic contrast: he distinguished between:
(i) Privative Oppositions, in which two phonemes are identical except that one contains a phonetic “mark” which the other lacks (e.g. / f / ~ / v /, the “mark” in this case being voice).
(ii) Gradual Oppositions in which the members differ in possessing different degrees of some gradient property (e.g. / I / ~ / e / ~ / æ /, with respect to the property of vowel aperture).
(iii) Equipollent Oppositions, in which each member has a distinguished mark lacking in the others (e.g. / p / ~ /t / ~ / k /).
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| Karl Popper |
Sir Karl Popper has taught us that the first duty of a scientist is to ensure that is claims are potentially falsifiable, because statements about observable evidence are empty statements.
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| Jakobson |
Jakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He represents one of the very few personal links between European and American traditions of linguistics; and his ideas have had much to do with the radical change of direction that has occurred in American linguistics over the last twenty years. He is interested in the analysis of phonemes into their component features rather than in the distribution of phonemes.
The essence of Jakobson’s approach to phonology is the notion that there is a relatively simple, orderly, universal ‘psychological system’ of sounds underlying the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sounds observed by the phonetician.
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| William Labov |
Because of their functional approach, it was natural that the prague scholars were particularly interested in the way that a language provides a speaker with a range of speech-styles appropriate to different social settings. This aspect of their work has recently been developed into a rich and sophisticated theory by the American William Labov, formerly of Columbia University and since the early 1970s at the University of Pennsylvania.
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- a variable-which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community.
What is staggering about Labov´s work is the subtlety, consistency and mathematical regularity it reveals in speakers´use of statistical linguistic variables and hearers´ reactions to them. 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 his language does not exist- a point that seemed undeniable. The Prague School and, now, Labov, are among the linguists who have taken the social dimension of language most seriously; and they have ended by destroying Saussure´s sharp separation between synchronic and diachronic study.
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| Saussure |
The Prague School : Founded in 1948, ISP has a long history of educational excellence in the Czech Republic. The school is accredited by the Council of International Schools and the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and offers the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma program to students in grades 11 and 12.
ACTIVITY: Crossword
