The Prague School practised 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 the Prague style.
For a linguist working in the American tradition, a grammar is a set of elements ‘emes’ of various kinds in Bloomfield´s framework, ‘rules’ of various sorts for a Chomskyan; the anakyst seems to take much the same attitude to the linguistic structure as one might take to a work of art, in that it does not usually occur to him to point to a particular element and ask ‘what´s that for?’- he is rather content to describe and to contemplate.
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 an how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.
One fairly straightforward example of functional explanation in Mathesius´s 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.
According to Mathesius, the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts: the theme, wich refers to something about which the hearer already knows, and the rheme, which states some new fact about that given topic. Unless certain special effects are animed at, theme will precede rheme, so that the peg may be established in the hearer´s mind before anything new has to be hung on it.
Even in English the passive has a second function: it enables us to reconcile the ocassional 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 were are unable or unwilling to say who kissed her.
It would be inaccurate to suggest that the notion of Functional Sentence Perspective was wholly unknown in American linguistics; some of the Descriptivists did use the terms ‘topic’ and ‘comment’ in much the same way as Mathesius´s ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’. A related point is that many Prague linguists were actively interesed in questions of standardizing linguistic usage.
The American Descriptivists not only, quite rightly, drew a logical distinction between linguistic description and linguistic prescription, but furthermore left their followers in little doubt that prescription was an improper, unprofessional activity in which no respectable linguist would indulge.
The theory of theme and rheme by no means exhausts Mathesius´s contributions to the functional view of grammar; given more space, I might have included a discussion of his notion of ‘functional onomatology’, which treats the coining of novel vocabulary items as a task which different languages solve in characteristically different ways.
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was one of the members of the ‘Prgue School’ not based in Czechoslovakia. He belonged to a scholarly family of the Russian nobility; his father had been a professor of philosophy and Rector of Moscow University. Trubetzkoy began at an early age to study Finno-Ugric and Caucasian folklore and philology; he was a student of Indo-European linguistics at his father´s university, and became a member of staff there in 1916.
Trubetzkoyan phonology, like that of the American Descriptivists, gives a central role to the phoneme; but Trubetzkoy, and the Prague School in general, were interested primarily in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes, i.e. the nature of the oppositions between the phonemes that potentially contrast with one another at a given point in a phonological structure, rather than in the syntagmate relations which determine how phonemes may be organized into sequences in a language.
Trubetzkoy, in the Principles, establishes a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology- that is, a language has, rather than simply treating its phonological structure in the take-it-or-leave-it American fashion as a set of isolated facts.
What is particularly relevant to our present discussion is that Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition. Consider the opposition between presence and absence of stress, for instance: there are perhaps rather few languages in which this is regularly distinctive.
In languages with more variable stress position, such as English or Russian, stress has less delimitative function and scarcely any distinctive function(pairs such as súbject (n) ~ subjéct (v), which are almost identical phonetically except for position of stress, are rare in English); but it has a culminative function: there is, very roughly speaking and ignoring a few ‘clitics’ such as a and the, one and only one main stress per word in English, so that perception of stress tells the hearer how many words he must segment the signal into, although it does not tell him where to make the cuts.
The Descriptivists thought of all phonological contrast as ‘distinctive’ contrast in Trubetzkoy´s sense. In the case of the fixed stress of Czech, for instance, a Descriptivist would have said either that it never keeps different words apart and is therefore to be ignored as non-phonemic, or else that there is a phonemic contrast between stress and its absence which is fully on a par, logically, with the opposition between /p/ and /b/ or /m/ and /n/. Trubetzkoy´s approach seems considerably more insightful than either of these alternatives.
A phonetic oppositon which fulfils the representation function will normally be a phonemic contrast; but distinctions between the allophones of a given phoneme, where the choice is not determined by the phonemic environment, will often play an expressive or conative role.
Another manofestation of the Prague attitude that language is a tool which has a job (or, rather, a wide variety of jobs) to do is the fact that members of that School were much preoccupied with the aesthetic, literaly aspects of language use (Gravin 1964 provides and anthology of some of this work).
If American linguists ignored (and still ignore) the aesthetic aspects of language, this is clearly because of their anxiety that linguistics should be a science. Bloomfieldians and Chomskyans disagree radically about the nature of science, but they are united in wainting to place linguistics firmly on the science side of the arts/science divide.
The first of these is what may be called the therapeutic theory of sound-change. Mathesius, and following him various other members of the Prague School, had the notion that sound changes were to be explained as the result of a striving towars a sort of ideal balance or resolution of various conflicting pressures; for instance, the need for a language too have a large variety of phonetic shapes available to keep its words distinct conflicts with the need for speech to be comprehensible despite inevitably inexact pronunciation, and at a more specific level the tendency in English, say, to pronounce the phoneme /e/ as a relatively close vowel in order to distinguish it clearly from /æ/ conflicts with the tendency to make it relatively open in order to distinguish in clearly from /I/.
The Prague School argues for system in diachrony too, and indeed it claims that linguistic change is determined by, as well as determining, synchronic état de langue.
The scholar who has done most to turn the therapeutic view of sound-change into an explicit, sophisticated theory is the Frenchman, André Martinet. The book in which Martinet set out his theories of diachronic phonology most fully is significantly entiled Économie des Changements Phonétiques.
One of the key concepts in Martinet´s account of sound-change is that of the functional yield of a phonological opposition. The functional yield of an opposition is, to put it simply, the amount of work it does in distinguishing utterances which are otherwise 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 lost, final m merged with n, the vowel system was greatly simplified,etc.
The language has of course compensated for his loss of phonological distinctions – if it had not, contemporary Mandarin would be so ambiguous as to be wholly unusuable.
Perhaps this obituary for Martinet´s theory of sound – change is premature; one can think of ways in which some sort of reaguard action might be mounted in its defence.
Sir Karl Popper has taught us that the first duty of a scientist is to ensure that his claims are potentially falsifiable, because statements about observable reality which could be overturned by no conceivable evidence are empty statements. Martinet´s defeat is therefore an honourable one.
Roman Osipovich Jakobson is a scholar of Russian origin; he took his first degree, in Oriental languages, at Moscow University. From the early 1920´s onwards he study and taught in Prague, and moved to a chair at the University of Bron in 1933, remaining there until the Nazi occupation forced him to leave. Jakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistics Circle.
Jakobson´s intellectual interests are broad and reflect those of the Prague School as a whole, he has written a great deal, for instance, on the structuralist approach to literature.
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 sound observed by the phonetician.
Speech-sounds may be characterized in terms of a number of distinct and independient or quasi-independient parameters, as we shall call them.
One of the lessons of articulatoty phonetics is that human vocal anatomy provides a very large range of different phonetic parameters – far more, probably, than any individual language uses distinctively.
The articulatory phonetician would be much more inclined to say that parameters which appear prima facie are really continuous rather than vice versa.
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 physycally continuous. The ideas just outlined are classically expressed in Jakobson, Fant and Halle´s Preliminaries to Speech Analysis.
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.
Jakobson uses observations of the latter categories as evidence against those who would suggest that his universals have relatively superficial physiological explanations.
The difficulty with this aspect of Jakobson´s work is that his evidence is highly anecdotal – he bases his ‘universals’ of synaesthesia on a tiny handful of reports about indicuduals; and one anecdote is always very vulnerable to a counter-anecdote.
One of the Characteristics of the Prague approach to language was a readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative ‘systems’, ‘registers’, or ‘styles’, where American Descriptivists tended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system.
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 rs which are actually pronounced in any given utterance.
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.
