Jigsaw puzzle: Copenhagen School

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Copenhagen School

Copenhagen School basic information

This is a mind map that I did searching information on the Internet about the Copenhagen School principles and contributors.


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Bibliography



An outline of the history of linguistics. http://mcgregor.continuumbooks.net/media/1/history_outline.pdf
Campbell, L. (2001), "The history of  linguistics", In M. Aronoff and J. Rees-Miller (eds), The Handook of Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 81-104
Círculo Lingüístico de Copenhague
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18866441/Circulo-Linguistico-de-Copenhague
FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS The Copenhagen School
http://wylwenwnd.blogspot.com/2011/11/functional-linguistics-copenhagen.html 2/nov/11

Word search: The prague school

In this word search game you must find the names of the most important contributors to the Prague School investigaction

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Prague School

Functional linguistics: the Prague School

Mathesius started a circle of like-minded linguistic scholars who made discussions and then started being recognized as the “Prague School”. They saw language in terms of function and they analyzed it with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the whole language. This was the difference between American descriptivists and Prague School linguists.

For Prague School, language is not a set of elements that have nothing to do between them, in fact they thought that all these elements determined the nature of others and all of them are interrelated. These linguists were trying to explain not only what the language is but also they why, which were the reasons for language to be the way it is.
According to Mathesius, the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts: theme, which refers to something about which the hearer already knows, and the rheme, which states some new fact about that given topic.

The notion of Functional Sentence Perspective was developed by the Prague scholars. They gave importance to using ideas and the motivations to explain structural differences between languages.

Let see a consideration of functional approach to phonology, as exemplified in the work or Trubetzkoy. He was one of the members of the Prague School not based in Czechoslovakia.
Trubetzkoyan phonology gives a central role to the phoneme but the School was interested primarily in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes. 
In his book, the Principles, establishes a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology, which enables us to say what kind of phonology a language has. He distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition.
He was conscious of that fact that the functions of speech are not limited to express explicit messages; so he divided these functions with other colleagues in: representation function, expressive function and the conative function.


On the other hand, Mathesius worked on what has been translated as “linguistic characterology”, which aimed to enable one to discuss what kind of grammar a language has.


Jacobson has written a great deal, for instance, on the structuralist approach to literature; the most important aspect of Jacobson´s work is his phonological theory. We was interested in they analysis of phonemes into their component features rather than in the distribution of phonemes. The essence of his approach is the notion that there is a relatively simple, orderly, universal “psychological system” of sound underlying the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sound observed by the phonetician.

The descriptivists emphasized that languages differ unpredictably in the particular phonetic parameters which they utilize distinctively, and in the number of values which they distinguish on parameters which are physically continuous and they tended to be reluctant to admit that any sound which can be found in some language might nevertheless be regarded as a difficult sound in any absolute sense.


On the other hand, for Jakobson only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role and that there are only twelve features that have these characteristic. We can understand by distinctive “able to be used distinctively in a human language.

An important part of this theory is that certain physically quite distinct articulatory parameters are “psychologically equivalent”. The notion that the universal distinctive features are organized into a innate hierarchy of relative importance appeared in one of his books.


He made his point that a study of children´s acquisition of language shows that the various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random order.

One characteristics of the Prague approach to language was a readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative systems, registers or styles, where American Descriptivists tended to insist on treating a language as a singly unitary system.

Due to their functional approach, Prague scholars were specially interested in the way that a language provides a speaker with a range of speech-styles appropriate to different social settings.

Finally we have to mention that 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 his language does not exist.  The Prague School and Labov are among the linguists who they have ended by destroying Saussure´s sharp separation between synchronic and diachronic study.

Hangman: The study of language

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The study of language

These following maps contain information about the different stages through which the study of language has passed over the years

Also they mention some of the most important researchers, like Sapir, Chomsky and Saussure, that defined the branches of linguistics and made crucial contributions to the study of language, starting with Plato and Aristotle, and including the latest researches.

Basic Concepts

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Concepts of linguistic theory II

Concepts

1. Linguistics: Is the scientific study of language. (Lyons, p. 1)

2. Generative semantics: A description of a language emphasizing a semantic deep structured that is logical in form that provides syntactic structure. (Webster, p. 521)

3. Universal grammar: The study of general principles believed to underlie the grammatical phenomena of all languages. Principles viewed as a part of an innate human capacity for learning a language. (Webster, p. 1369)

4. Descriptive linguistics: Provide the data which confirms or refutes the prepositions and theories but forward in general linguistics. (Lyons, p. 34)

5. Historical linguistics: It studies the historical development of the language. (Lyons, p. 35)

6. Generative grammar: A description in the form of a set of rules for producing the grammatical sentences of a language. (Webster, p. 521)

7. Ethnographic Linguistics: It holds that language and social life are mutually shaping, and that close analysis of situated language use can provide both fundamental and distinctive insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of social and cultural production in everyday activity.

8. Sociolinguistics: It is the study of language considering the context where it is used considering factors as social class, age, sex, educational level, cultural norms, place where the conversation is held. (Lyons, p. 266).

Bibliography

• Lyons, John. Language and linguistics. Cambridge, Reino Unido: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
• Linguistic Ethnography. http://uklef.net/linguisticethnography.html
• Merriam Webster´s Collegiate Dictionary, 11^th edition. Springfield: Merriam-Webster Inc., 2009. Printed