The Prague School

Vilém Mathesius

Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius

Linguists of the Prague school stress the function of elements within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts, and they have distinguished themselves in the study of sound systems. They developed distinctive-feature analysis of sounds; by this analysis, each distinctive sound.

Trubetzkoy

Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology.

Trubetzkoy, like other members of the Prague School, was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message.

In analysing the function of speech Trubetzkoy followed his Viennese philosopher collage Karl Bühler, who distinguish between the representation of function(that stating facts), the expressive function (that of expressing temporary or permanent characteristics of the speaker), and the conative function (that of influencing the hearer).Trubetzkoy shows that Bühler´s analysis can be applied in phonology.

A phonetic opposition which fulfils the representation function will normally be a phonetic contrast; but distinctions between the allophones of a given phoneme, where the choice is not determinated by the phonemic environment, often play an expressive or conative role.        

Jakobson

Roman Jakobson is a scholar of Russian origin; he took his first degree, in Oriental languages, at Moscow University

Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century.

Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology.

Functions of language determined for 6 factors:

1. REFERENTIAL

-We Use it when we intend to convey information without making judgments about   it or pretend reactions of the addresser.

2. EMOTIVE

-Produce an impression of certain emotion.

- Expressive.

3. CONATIVE

-It finds its purest grammatical expression in the vocative and imperative.

- Appellative, ordering, begging.

4. PHATIC

- Emphasis on contact. Ex/Hello, are you angry?

- A profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication.

5. METALINGUAL

- Focus on code.

- Whenever the addresser an/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code.

6. POETIC

- Focus on the message for its own sake.

- As literature.

ACTIVITY:

Functions of Language