Functional linguistics: the Prague School

Around Mathessius there came into being a circle of like-minded linguistics scholars, who began to meet for regular discussion from 1926 onwards, and came to be recognized as 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 Czechoslovaquia, the term is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered to the Prague style. For a linguistic 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 analyst seems to take much the same attitude to the linguistics structure as one might to take to 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 Linguistics, on the other hand, looked at languages as one might look a motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others. 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 explanation, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were. American linguistics restricted them to description.

One fairly straightforward example of functional explanation in Methodius’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.

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 grammatical requirement that each finite verb a subject. The passive construction, in sentences such as Adoption of the proposal is felt to be inadvisable, is beloved by bureaucrats aiming to disclaim responsibility for their decisions.  But English is unusual in the frequency with which ´full ‘passives with phrases occur; the notion of Functional Sentence Perspective shows us a job which such constructions do in English and which is carried out by other means in other languages.

Descriptivist tended to be suspicious of questions beginning with the word ´why, regarding them as a relic of childhood which mature scientists should have learned to put behind them. Chomskyan grammar will simply list the syntactic ´transformations´, such as Passive, which given language needs them, or why one language possesses some particular construction with another language lacks or uses very rarely.

A related point is that many Prague linguistics were actively interested in questions of standardizing linguistics. Such an interest was perhaps natural for Czechs, whose language is marked by unusually extreme 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 certain encouraged also by the functional approach of the Prague School.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the ´Prague School´ not based in Czechoslovaquia. He belonged to a scholarly family of the Russian nobility. Trubetzkoy began at an early age to study Finno-Ugric and Caucasian folklore and philology; he was student of Indo-European linguistics at his father´s university, and became a member of staff there in 1916. In 1922 he was appointed to the chair of Slavonic philology at Vienna, and he became a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle when it came into being under Mathesius´s aegis a few years later. Trubetzkoy remained in Vienna until he died a few months after the 1938 Anschluss, from a heart condition brought to a crisis by Gestapo interrogation (he had been a public opponent of Nazism).

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 1 point in a phonological structure, rather than in the syntagmatic relations which determine how phonemes may be organized into sequences in a language.

Trubetzkoy developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic contrast: e.g. he distinguished between (i) privative oppositions, (ii) gradual oppositions and (iii) equipollent oppositions. Trubetzkoy, in the Principles establishes a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology- that is, a language has, rather than a 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 serve by a phonological opposition. He called the distinctive function, but this is by no means the only function that a phonological opposition may serve. Consider the opposition between presence and absence of stressed, for instance: there are perhaps rather few languages in which this is regularly distinctive.  In Czech in which every word is stressed on the firs syllable or Polish in which words normally bear penultimate stress, stress has no distinctive role but it has a delimitative function: it helps the hearer locate word-boundaries in the speech signal, which is something he needs to do if he is to make sense of what he hears. In language with more variables stress position, such an English or Russian, stress has less delimitative function and scarcely any distinctive function. But Trubetzkoy, like other members of the Prague School, was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message.  In analyzing the functions of speech Trubetzkoy followed his Viennese philosopher colleague Karl Buhler, who distinguished between the representation function, the expressive function, and the conative function.

Another manifestation of the Prague attitude that language is a tool which has a job to do is the fact that members of that School were much preoccupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use.

Prague group constituted one of the few genuine points of contact between linguistics, and structuralism in the continental sense – a discipline whose contemporary practitioners often appeal to the precedent of linguistics in their approaches to literary the linguistic concepts which they cite.

Developments of the Prague School

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, while was a vacant slot, on the other hand might be called a sore thumb it is an isolated sound not fitting into the overall pattern of English phonemes; and many English dialect have abandoned the /h/ phoneme.

The scholar who has done most to turn the therapeutic view of sound- change into an explicit, sophisticated theory is the Frenchman, André Martinet (b. 1908). Martinet himself never lived in Prague; he was appointed to the École Practique des Hautes Études in Paris 1938 but spent the war years interned as an army officer, becoming head of the linguistics department at Columbia University in 1947 and returning in 1955 to the École des Hautes Études. Martinet was heavily influenced by Prague thinking from early stage in his career, and nowadays it seems fair to describe him as the chief contemporary proponent of mainstream Prague ideas.

Another theory evolved out of Prague School doctrines, was named Jakobson´s theory of phonological universals. Roman Osipovich Jakobson, a scholar of Russian origin, was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. And since 1957 he has been associated with the next-door institution of MIT, which was to become the focus of the modern revolution in linguistics. In fact, he represents one of the very few personal links between European and American traditions of linguistics.

The most important aspect of Jacobson´s work is his phonological theory. The essence of Jacobson´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 independent parameters.

o   One articulatory parameter: The height within the oral cavity of the highest point of the tongue (a vowel may be ´close´ or ´open`.

o   The position of the point on the front/back scale (vowels may be ´front´ or ´back´.

o   Position of the soft palate: any vowel and many consonants can be ´nasal´ or ´oral´.

One of the lessons of articulatory phonetics is that human vocal anatomy provides a very large range of different phonetic parameters – far more than individual language uses distinctively. In English phonology, parameters differ considerably in the number of alternative values they may take. For example, the nasality: the soft palate is either raised or lowered, and thus a sound is either oral or nasal; and the open/close and front/back parameters for tongue position represent continuous ranges of values.

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.  Many languages exploit the contrasts in airstream mechanisms and vocal-chord actions which English ignores, while making no use of contrasts which are important in English. The Descriptivists tended to see all phonetic parameters and all sounds as intrinsically equal in their potential for use in a language, and also they tended to admit that any sound which can be found in some language might nevertheless be regarded as a relatively difficult sound.

Jakobson, on the other hand, for him only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role; despite surface appearances each of these parameters is of the rigidly two-value type, and the system of parameters forms a fixed hierarchy of precedence. Jakobson thus attacks Saussurean/Boasian relativism for phonology.

In the book Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, Jakobson lists a set of twelve pairs of terms which label the alternative values of what are claimed to be the twelve ´distinctive features´ of all human speech.  For him, this term means ´able to be used distinctively in human language´; and with this expectation results that almost all languages will make use of almost all the twelve features. He published that the notion that the universal distinctive features are organized into an innate hierarchy of relative importance or priority. He made the point that a study of children´s acquisition of language shows that the various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random order. Then he went on to argue that this hierarchy of phonological features, which is established on the basis of data about children´s acquisition of language, manifests itself also in comparative studies of adult languages and in the symptoms of aphasia.

Jakobson uses observations of latter categories as evidence against who would suggest that his universals have relatively superficial physiological explanations. For example, it is often suggested that the reason why labials are relatively early consonants is because they are made with an action similar to the sucking reflex which allows newborn children to feed at the breast.

In order to substantiate his phonological universals, he discusses about cases where perception in one sensory mode (speech-sound) correlate with perceptions in another mode (he considered associations with colors).

He could show that, for people who make such associations, particular distinctive features as he analyses them are linked with particular visual qualities, and then he had good evidence both for the validity of his system of distinctive features and for the claim that the reality to which the system corresponds is something in the mind rather than in, for example, the musculature of the mouth.

He based his universals of synaesthesia on a tiny handful of reports about individuals.  He claimed that synaesthetic subjects tend to perceive vowels as coloured but consonants as colourles- black, white or grey. However, the present writer has since childhood perceived the letters of the alphabet as having certain fixed colours.

Prague Thought

These aspects had led to one of the most interesting and fruitful developments of the last decade. One of the characteristics 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 Descriptivists tended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system.  For example: the treatment of non-naturalized foreign loan-words, and when we compare the sounds of a rapid speech with those heard in careful delivery of the same language.

Because of their functional approach, it was natural that 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. This aspect has been developed in a sophisticated theory by the American William Labov. His 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 forms.

The most important fact is that while some determining factors, such as speaker´s educational attainments, will be constant for a given speaker throughout his adult life, others, such as degree of formality of the speech-situation, will vary for a given speaker from one occasion to another; and even in the case of factors which are constant for each individual speaker, it can be shown that hearers are acutely sensitive to the correlations between linguistic and social variables. There is nothing surprising in the finding that speakers are familiar with a variety of speech-styles, but it is supposed that such knowledge was patchy and inaccurate. And finally, something amazing about Lavo´s work is the subtlety, consistency and mathematical regularity it reveals in speaker´s use of statistical variables and hearers ´reactions to them.