London School of Linguistics

Or the London school of structuralism is a trend in contemporary structural linguistics (J. R. Firth, W. Sidney Allen, R. H. Robins, and M. A. K. Halliday).

The London school of linguistics is involved with the study of language on the descriptive plane (synchrony), the distinguishing of structural (syntagmatics) and systemic (paradigmatics) concepts, and the social aspects of language. In the forefront is semantics. The school’s primary contribution to linguistics has been the situational theory of meaning in semantics (the dependence of the meaning of a linguistic unit on its use in a standard context by a definite person; functional variations in speech are distinguished on the basis of typical contexts) and the prosodic analysis in phonology (the consideration of the phenomena accruing to a sound: the number and nature of syllables, the character of sound sequences, morpheme boundaries, stress, and so on). The distinctive function is considered to be the primary function of a phoneme.

The London school rejects the concepts of the speech collective and social experience and studies the speech of the individual person; it is subject to terminological and methodological inaccuracy and proves in many aspects to be linguistics of speech and not language.

Compared to other schools of modern linguistics, the London School is more interested in instrumentality of language and meaning or function in context. Influenced by Malinowski's theorizing, Firth and his followers stress the functioning of language and argue that language cannot be disassociated from meaning and should be looked at from a sociological perspective. The London School and the systemic functional grammar, which has developed out of the London approach to language, consider meaning and function as the basis of human language and communicative activity. The linguistic theorizing in the London style is of practical significance and therefore is more relevant to sociolinguistics, stylistics, literary criticism and language teaching. From the linguistic ideas of a few important figures of the London School, we may see the developmental stages this School has gone through and how the tradition has been established for the academic discipline of linguistics in Britain.

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Functional Linguistics: the Prague School

The Prague school, or Prague linguistic circle, was an influential group of literary critics and linguists in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralism literary analysis during the years 1928–1939. It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. Following the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the circle was disbanded in 1952, but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian linguistics). American scholar Dell Hymes cites his 1962 paper, "The Ethnography of Speaking," as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to American linguistic anthropology.

The Prague linguistic circle included the Russian émigrés Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevskiy, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars René Wellek and Jan Mukarovský. The instigator of the circle and its first president was the Czech linguist Vilém Mathesius (President of PLC until his death in 1945).

In 1929 the Circle promulgated its theses in a paper submitted to the First Congress of Slavists. "The programmatic 1929 Prague Theses, surely one of the most imposing linguistic edifices of the 20th century, encapsulated the functionalist credo”. In the late 20th century, English translations of the Circle's seminal works were published by the Czech linguist Josef Vachek in several collections.

The hallmark of Prague linguistic was that it saw language in terms of functions. They analyzed a given language with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language. This differentiated the Prague School sharply from their contemporaries, the American Descriptivists. 

Prague linguistics looked at languages as one might look as 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 notions of “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.

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 on the Prague tradition. Most sentences are uttered in order to give the hearer dome information; but obviously we do not produce unrelated pieces of information chosen at random, rather we carefully tailor our statements with a view not only to what we want the hearer to learn but also to what he already knows and to the context of discourse which we have so far built up. According to Mathesius, the need for community means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts: the theme, which refers to something about which the hearer already knows, and the rheme, which states some new fact about that given topic.

Very often, the theme/rheme division will correspond to the syntactic distinction between subject and predicate, or between subject-plus-transitive-verb and object a related point is that many Prague linguistics were actively interested in questions of standardizing linguistics usage. Such an interest was perhaps natural for Czechs, whose language is marked by unusually extreme divergence between literary and colloquial usage, and had n the inter-war period only just become the official language of an independent State, but it was certainly encouraged also by the functional approach of the Prague School.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was one of the members of the Prague School not based in Czechoslovakia. He belonged to a scholarly family of the Russian nobility; his father had been a professor of philology 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. In 41922 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 Mahesius’s aegis a few years later.

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 syntagmatic relations which determine how phonemes may be organized into sequences in a language.

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