PRAGUE SCHOOL SUMMARY

Prague School

Members of the Prague School thought of language as a whole as serving a purpose, which is a truism that would hardly differentiate them from others, but they analysed a given language with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language.

Prague linguistics, looked at language as one might look at a motor, seeking to understand what the jobs various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.

According to Mathesius, the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts (which, may be, very unequal in length): the theme, which refers to something about which the hearer already knows (often because it has been discussed in immediately preceding sentences), and the theme, which states some new fact about the given topic.

A related point is that much Prague linguistics was actively interested in questions of standardizing linguistics usage.

Jakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He spent much of the Second World War at the Ecole Nobre des Études which was established in New York City as home for refugee scholars from Europe.

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 Descriptivist tended to insist on a treating a language as a simple unitary system.

A prague linguist would be ready, indeed eager, to say that English has a system of native phonemes which excludes even though that sound may occur in a subsidiary stock of borrowed words, and that if the phonology of rapid English differs their respective from that English spoken slowly then their respective grammars should be kept distinct rather than merged together.

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 this language does not exist- a point seemed undeniable.