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.