FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS: THE PRAGUE SCHOOL

Functional linguistics: The Prague School

The Prague School practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics, and although most of the scholars whom one thinks of as members of the school worked in Prague or at least in Czechoslovakia, the term is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered to Prague style.

The hallmark of Prague linguistics was that it saw language n terms of function. The members of The Prague School thought of language as a whole as serving a purpose, which is a truism that would hardly differentiated them from others, but that they analyzed a given language with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language. This differentiated the Prague School sharply from their contemporaries, the American Descriptivists.

Prague linguists, on the other hand, 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. As long as they were describing the structure of a language,  the practice of the Prague School was not very different from that of their contemporaries- they used the notions phoneme and morpheme, for instance; but they tried to go beyond description to explanations, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.

One fairly straightforward example of functional explanation in Mathesius own work concerns his use of terms commonly translated theme and rheme, and the notion which has come to be called Functional Sentence Perspective by recent writers working in the Prague tradition. Most sentences are uttered in order to give the hearer some information; but obviously we do not produce unrelated pieces of information chosen at random, rather we carefully tailor our statements with a view not only to what we want the hearer to learn but also to what he already knows and to the context of discourse which we have so far built up.

However, English uses word-order to mark grammatical relations such as subject and object, and so is not free to permute the words of John kissed Eve so simply. Instead, we solve the problem by using the passive construction, Eve was kissed by John, which signals the fact that the grammatical subject is not the doer of the action. In Czech the passive construction is rare, and particularly so when the actor is mentioned in the equivalent of a by-phrase. Even in English the passive has a second function: it enables us to reconcile the occasional wish not to be explicit about the identity of the actor with the grammatical requirement that each finite verb have a subject, so that we can say Eve was kissed if we are unable or unwilling to say who kissed her.

A related point is that many Prague linguists were actively interested in questions of standardizing linguistic usage: see e.g. Havránek. Such an interest was perhaps natural for divergence between literary and colloquial usage, and had in the inter-war period only just become the official language of an independent State; but it was certainly encouraged also by the functional approach of the Prague School.

The theory of theme and rheme by no means exhausts Mathesiu´s contributions to the functional view of grammar; given more space.

Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition:

*Distinctive function: The obvious function that of keeping different words or longer sequences apart.

*Delimitative function: It helps the hearer locate word-boundaries in the speech signal.

*Negative delimitative function: When we hear that sound we know that there can’t be a morpheme boundary immediately before it.

*Culminative function: Perception of stress tells the hearer how, any words he must segment the signal into, although it does not tell him where to make the cuts.

Each of the three phonological functions has to do with enabling the hearer to work out what sequence of words has been uttered by the speaker.

Karl distinguished another three functions:

*Representation function: Starting facts.

*Expressive function: Expressing temporary or permanent characteristics of the speaker.

*Conative function: Influencing the hearer.

Vowel duration is a respect in which RP and standard American English differ markedly in their phonological structure.

*In RP, vowel duration is phonologically determined.

*In American English, vowel duration has no distinctive function and is always free to vary, and length is used to engage the emotions of the hearer.

Another manifestation of the Prague attitude is the fact that members of that School were much preoccupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use.

Mathesius had the notion of the Therapeutic Theory of Sound-Change that sound changes were to be explained as the result of a striving towards a sort of ideal balance or resolution of various conflicting pressures.

Saussure contrasted two kinds of linguistics:

*Synchronic linguistics: The study of a system in which the various elements derive their values from their mutual relationship.

*Historical linguistics: The description of a sequence of isolated, unsystematic events.

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

André Martinet, a Frenchman, has done most to turn the therapeutic view of sound-change into an explicit, sophisticated theory.

One of the key concepts in Martinet’s account of sound-change is that of the functional yield of a phonological opposition, which is the amount of work it does in distinguishing utterances which are otherwise alike.

In a conservative style of French, we find a distinction of duration between, for example, [mεtr] mètre and [mε: tr] maitre; but there are few minimal pairs, and duration is not distintictive in other vowels: as predicted, younger speakers pronounce words such as mètre and maitre alike the history of Mandarin Chinese, for instance, has been one of repeated massive losses of phonological distinctions: final stops dropped, the voice contrast in initial consonants was lot, final m merged with n, the vowel system was greatly simplified, etc. in Chinese, morphemes and syllables are co-terminous, but modern Mandarin has so few phonologically distinct syllables that on averages each syllable is ambiguous as between three or four etymologically distinct morphemes in current use.

The language has of course compensated for this loss of phonological distinctions-if it had not, contemporary Mandarin would be so ambiguous as to be wholly unusable.

Perhaps this obituary for Martinet´s theory of sound-change is premature; one can think of ways in which some sort of rearguard action might be mounted in its defence.

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

The Descriptivists emphasized that languages differ unpredictably in the particular phonetic parameters which they utilize distinctively, and in the number of values which they distinguish on parameters which are physically continuous.

The Descriptivits´ approach to phonology might be described metaphorically as `democratic´, in that they tended to see all phonetic parameters and all sounds as intrinsically equal in their potential for use in a language. Descriptivists tended to be reluctant to admit that any sound which can be found in some language might nevertheless be regarded as a relatively `difficult´ sound in any absolute sense.

Jakobson, on the other hand, is a phonological Tory.

Furthermore, the details of the invariant system are not determined by mundane consideration such as vocal-tract anatomy or the need for easily perceived distinctions, but by much ¨deeper¨ principles having to do with innate features of the human mind.

The ideas just outlined are classically expressed in Jakobson, Fant and Hall´s Preliminaries to Speech Analysis.

For Bloomfield, voicing say was distinctive in English and non-distinctive in Mandarin, but the question ´Is voicing distinctive in language in general?´ would have been wholly meaningless, since any phonetic parameter could be and probably was used distinctively in at least a few languages.

An important part of the theory is that certain physically quite distinct articulatory parameters are ¨psychocologically equivalent as one might say , for example, the jakobsonian feature Flat (as in music – the use of impressionistic rather than technical phonetic terms is deliberate ) represents interchangeable each of the following articulatory parameter-values.

The notion that the universal distinctive features are organized into an innate hierarchy of relative importance or priority appears in a book which Jakobson published in the period between leaving Czechoslovakia and arriving in America. He makes de point, to begin with, that the various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random.

There are many languages which lack front rounded vowels or which have only a single liquid instead of a distinction between [r] and[l] , but no languages fail to distinguish [p] from [t] (except for a few special access of tribes which mutilate the lips for cosmetic purpose and are therefore physically incapable of producing labials.

In order to substantiate he belief that phonological universals he discusses are determined by deep psychologically principles rather than by relative uninteresting facts about oral anatomy or the like, Jakobson devotes considerable space to discussion of synaesthetic effects.

The difficulty with this aspect of Jacobson’s work is that his evidence is highly anecdotal – he bases his universals of synaesthesia on a tiny handful of reports about individuals and one anecdote is always very vulnerable to a counter-anecdote.

However the present writer has since childhood perceived the letters of the alphabet as having certain in my own aynaesthesia is that while three of the five vowel letters are coloured (the exemptions being the nasal letters M and N. The natural for the Jakobson evidence being what it is, this individual observation goes quite a long way towards refuting his claims about universals of sound-synaesthesia.

One of the characteristic of the Prague approach to language was readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative “systems”, “registers”, or “styles”, where American Descriptivist tended to insist on treating a language as single unitary system. 

And 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.

It was developed by the American William Labov. 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.

But in that situation, Bloomfieldian would acknowledge that various individual speakers may speak different “idiolects”.

However age and social standing of the speaker, degree of formality of the interview, and other factors all interact to determine in a highly systematic and predictable fashion the proportion of possible post-vocalic (ex. “rs”) which is actually pronounced in any given utterance.

Labov’s work revels in speakers’ use statistical linguistic variables and hearers’ reactions to them.

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’ sharp separation between synchronic and diachronic study.