Functional Linguistics

Prague School.

· This is the school of linguistic thought and analysis was established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius. It included among its most prominent members the Russian linguist Nikolay Trubetskoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson; this school was mostly active during the 1920s and ’30s.

· 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.

· The members of The Prague School thought of language as a whole as serving a purpose.

· They tried to go beyond description to explanations, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.

· The Prague School argues for system in diachrony and it claims that linguistics change is determined by synchronic état de langue.

Trubetzkoy

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (Russian; Moscow, April 16, 1890 - Vienna, June 25, 1938) 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. He was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message. He 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).  

Roman Jakobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson (October 11, 1896, Moscow – July 18, 1982, Boston) is a scholar of Russian origin; he took his first degree, in Oriental languages, at Moscow University.

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. He went on to apply a technique of analysis to syntax and morphology, and he proposed that they should be extended to semantics, which is the study of meaning in language.

 In order to substantiate his belief, that the phonological universals he discusses are determined by “deep” psychological principles rather than by relatively uninteresting facts about oral anatomy or the like, Jakobson devotes considerable space to discussion of synaesthetic effects in which cases where perceptions in one sensory mode (speech-sound) correlate with perceptions in another mode (Jakobson considers mainly associations of sounds with colors).

Readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative “systems”, “registers” or “styles”; where American Descriptivists rended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system. Consider, as a very crude example of the problem, the treatment of non-naturalized foreign loan-words. Nasal vowels are not usual in English, so a Descriptivist would find it difficult to justify the omission of /Ʒ/ from a phonemic analysis of English.

Functions of Language

The functions of a language are determined by six factors, which are:

1.    Referential

2.    Emotive

3.    Conative

4.    Phatic

5.    Metalingual

6.    Poetic

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