Functional Linguistcs: the Prague School

                             Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis           

established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius

Nikolay Trubetskoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson; the school was most active during the 1920s and ’30s.

Linguists of the Prague school stress the function of elements within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts, and they have distinguished themselves in the study of sound systems. They developed distinctive-feature analysis of sounds; by this analysis, each distinctive sound.

The members of The Prague School thought of language as a whole as serving a purpose.

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.

They tried to go beyond description to explanations, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were. Mathesius: theme and rheme. Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition: Distinctive function, delimitative function, culminative function.

One of the characteristic of the Prague approach to language was readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include.

The Descriptivist´ approach to phonology might be described metaphorically as `democratic´.