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.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario