School of Linguistics

It pertains to the people who have invented particular theories of linguistics and those who have followed them. For example, the traditional grammar school, the European structuralist school, the American structuralist school, the transformational-generative school, the Prague school, the London school, the Geneva school, the Moscow school, the modern functional school, and many others.

PRAGUE SCHOOL OF LINGUISTICS /PRAGUE LINGUISTIC CIRCLE

Although most of the scholars whom one thinks of as members of the school worked in Prague or at least in Czechoslovakia, the tem is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered to Prague Style.

CHRONICLE OF THE PRAGUE SCHOOL

1915: The foundation of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. 1929: Presenting the Prague Manifesto at the first International Congress of Linguistics at Hague. 1917: Members fleeing Moscow due to October Revolution. 1926 :The foundation of the Prague School Linguistic Circle.

1952: The circle was disbanded.

1989 :After the political changes, the Circle's activity was slowly renewed.

IMPORTANT MEMBERS OF THE PRAGUE LINGUISTIC CIRCLE

VILM MATHESIUS He was the cofounder and president of the Prague Linguistic Circle. (President of PLC until his death in 1945).

REN WELLEK Early member of the Circle helped spread their way of linguistics to America. He was a CzechAmerican comparative literary critic.

ROMAN OSIPOVICH JAKOBSON

Russian thinker who helped form the Moscow Linguistic Circle before moving to Prague. The vice president of Prague Linguistic Circle.

PRINCE NIKOLAY SERGEYEVICH TRUBETZKOYA Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics.

JAN MUKAOVSKHe is well known for his association with early structuralism as well as with the Prague Linguistic Circle, and for his development of the ideas of Russian formalism.

MAIN THEORY AND TASK

FUNCTIONAL PHONOLOGY The phonological theory predominantly associated with the Russian, Nikolaj Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (18901938). This theory is also known as Prague School phonology.

Functions that can be served by phonological opposition

1. The representative function, whereby
speakers inform listeners of whatever extra linguistic facts or states they are talking about. 2. The indexical or expressive function whereby information is revealed to the listener about various aspects of the speaker. 3. The appellative or conative function which serves to provoke well-definable impressions or feelings in the listener.

4. The distinctive function. It is the

function by virtue of which linguistic forms are opposed to, or differentiated from, each other. The minimal linguistic form that is meaningful, or the minimal significant unit, is known as a moneme, which consists in the association between a signifier (vocal expression) and a signified (semantic content).

5. The contrastive function which

enables the listener to analyse a spoken chain into a series of significant units like monemes, words, phrases, etc. 6. The demarcative or delimitative function, which is fulfilled in such a way that the boundary between significant units is indicated.

7. The expressive function,

whereby speakers convey to listeners their state of mind (real or feigned) without resorting to the use of an additional moneme or monemes.

PHONEMIC CONTRAST
Privative oppositions, in which two phonemes are identical except that one contains a phonetic mark which the other lacks e.g. /f/ and v/, the mark in this case being voice. Gradual oppositions in which the members differ in possessing different degrees of some gradient property e.g. /I/, /e/ and /ae/ with respect to the property of vowel aperture. Equipollent oppositions in which each memberhas a distinguishing mak lacking in the others e.g. /p/, /t/ and /k/.

FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE (FSP)

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to an analysis of utterances (or texts) 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 important concepts in this view include: Theme the point of departure of a sentence, which is equally present to the speaker and hearer; Rheme -- the goal of discourse which presents the very information that is to be imparted to the hearer; Known/ given information -- information that is not new to the reader or hearer; New information -- what is to be transmitted to the reader or hearer. Therefore the subject-predicate distinction is not always the same as theme-rheme distinction.

A. Sally Suject Theme stands on the table Predicate Rheme

B. On the Sally table stands Predicate Suject Rheme Theme

FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS
-refers to the study of the form of language in reference to their social function in communication. It considers the individual as a social being and investigates the way in which she/he acquires language and uses it in order to communicate with others in her or his social environment. The Prague linguistics 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. They used the notion of phoneme and morpheme, for instance; but they tried to go beyond descriptions to explanation, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.

STRUCTURALISM IN LITERATURE
In literary studies as in linguistics the term structuralism was invented during the early 1930s by Jakobson, Mukarovsky, and their colleagues of the Prague Linguistic Circle. The approach to literature which they advocated rested on the simple proposition that the individual work should be treated as a structure. By which they meant the sum of the interrelations of its parts, and that the significance of these different parts could not be considered outside their relationship with the whole.