A Brief Introduction to the Prague School

A Brief Introduction to the Prague School

Number: 200711010521

Name: 万新宇

The Prague school was an influential group of literary critics and linguists which was established by Mathesius, Trnka, Jakobson, Karcevskij in 1926 and under the leadership of Mathesius (1882--1946).This school had a particularly important contribution is that it sees language in terms of function. They believed that linguistic theory should go beyond the mere description of linguistic structure to explain the functions fulfilled by linguistic forms.

The Prague School has developed many ideas on linguistics, and three of them are very important. First, it was stressed that the synchronic study of language is fully justified as it can draw on complete and controllable material for investigation. Second, there was an emphasis on the systemic character of language. It was argued that no element of any language can satisfactorily analysed or evaluated if viewed in isolation. Assessment can only be made if its relationship is established with the coexisting elements in the same language system. In other

words, elements are held to be in functional contrast or opposition.Third, language was looked on as functional in another sense.

The Prague school is famous for its contribution to phonology and the distinction between phonetics and phonology. The most influential scholar of this school is Trubetzkoy(1890--1938),who wrote the Principle of Phonogy(1939) to express the most complete and authoritative statements. Trubetzkoy thought phonetics belonged to parole whereas phonology belonged to langue. On this basis he developed the notion of “phoneme”as an abstract unit of the sound actually produced. In his opinion, purpose of developing a phonological theory is the development of universally valid laws governing the structure of phonemic systems.

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), another theory Inspired by the ideas of the Prague School, is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to an analysis of utterances 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. Some Czech linguists devoted considerable attention to problem of analyzing sentences from a functional point of view. They believe that a sentence contains point of departure and a goal of discourse. The point of departure is equally present to the speaker and to the hearer, and is called the THEME. The goal of discourse present the very information that is tube imparted to the hearer, and is called the RHEME. It is believed that the movement from the THEME to RHEME reveals the movement of the mind itself .Language may use different syntactic structures, but the order of ideas remains basically the same. Based on these observations, they created the notion of FSP to describe how information is distributed insentences.FSP deals particularly with the effect of the distribution of known information and new information in discourse. The known information refers to information that is not new to the reader or hearer. The new information is

what is to be transmitted to the reader or hearer. The theory of FSP is concerned with the distribution of information as determined by all meaningful elements, from intonation (for speech) to context. A central feature of FSP is communicative dynamism. Jan Firebase discusses the distribution of the degrees of communicative dynamism (CD) over sentence elements, which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence. He examines also the relation of theme and rhyme to, and implementation by, syntactic components. Special attention is paid to the relation between FSP and word order. The second part of the book deals with spoken communication and considers the place of intonation in the interplay of FSP factors, establishing the concept of prosodic prominence. It tackles the relationship between the distribution of degrees of communicative dynamism as determined by the interplay of the non-prosodic FSP factors and the distribution of degrees of prosodic prominence as brought about by intonation.

The Prague School successfully changed the character of European linguistics as well as the United States. It influenced the old centuries even till today, we could see it will have much to offer.