Prague School Summary

The Prage School practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics. The hallmark of Prague linguistics was that it saw language in terms of function. For a linguistic working in the American tradition, a grammar is a set of elements of various kinds in Bloomfield’s framework, rules of various sorts of a chomskyan.

Prague Linguists was 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 phoneme and morpheme, but they tried to go beyond description to explanation. The functional explanation aroused from the Malthesius’s work. He called the notion of theme and rheme as ‘functional sentence perspective’. Many sentences are uttered in order to give the hearer some information, but we carefully tailor our statements with a view about what we want the hearer to learn, what he already knows and the context of the discourse.

The modern Chomskyan school, however, lays great stress on the need for linguistics statements to ‘explain’ rather than merely ‘describe’ and it has no objection to the postulation of unobservables; yet a Chomskian grammar will simply list the syntactic ‘transformations’ such as passive, which a given languages contains, and will give no hint as to why the language needs them, or why one language possesses some particular construction which another language lacks or uses very rarely.

The basic approach to the study of linguistics of the Prague Circle sees language as a synchronic and dynamic system. The functionality of elements of language and the importance of its social function have been key aspects of its research program.

In 1928, the Prague Linguistic Circle group of Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and Kartsevsky announced a radical departure from the classical structural position of Ferdinand de Saussure. They suggested that their methods of studying the function of speech sounds could be applied both synchronically, to a language as it exists, and diachronically, to a language as it changes.

The Prague School stresses the function of elements within language, their contrast to one another, and the system formed by these elements. They developed distinctive feature analysis, by which each sound is regarded as composed of contrasting articulatory and acoustic features, with sounds perceived as different having at least one contrasting feature.

While they were known for their identification of the "distinctive features" of language, these theorists also explored culture and aesthetics. In fact, Jakobson considered language to be a means of the expression and development of culture.

Thus, the general approach of the Prague school can be described as a combination of functionalism—every component of a language, such as phoneme, morpheme, word, sentence, exists to fulfill a particular function—and structuralism—the context not just the components is what is important. In addition, synchronic and diachronic approaches are seen as interconnected and influencing each other. They regard language as a system of subsystems, each of which has its own problems but these are never isolated since they are part of a larger whole. As such, a language is never in a state of equilibrium, but rather has many deviations. It is these deviations that allow the language to develop and function as a living system (Doubravová 1999).

Since 1989 under the leadership of Oldřich Leška, the Prague School's activity was renewed, resulting in the publication of the new Travaux in 1995 and a successful conference on 70 Years of PLC in 1996 which also commemorated the 100th anniversary of Roman Jakobson's birthday.

In addition, Prague has become the site of many conferences on linguistics, in particular those organized by the Institute for Applied and Formal Linguistics (UFAL) at Charles University. Eva Hajicova, the director of UFAL, also became co-editor of the Cicle's Travaux.