FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS: THE PRAGUE SCHOOL

Functional linguistic: the Prague School

We have seen that the ímpetus towards synchronic linguistics. A third impulse in the same direction came from Vilem Mathesius (1882-1945), Caroline University of Prague, Saussure´s lectures on synchronic linguistics were given in 1911 when Mathesius published his first call for a new, non- historical approach to language study.

The hallmark of Prague linguistics was that it saw the language in terms of function. This differentiated the Prague School sharply from their contemporaries, the American Descriptivist.  Prague linguists looked at languages as one might look at motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others. The practice of Prague School was not different from that of their contemporaries – they said the notions “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 were.

One fairly straightforward example of functional explanation in Mathesius’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”. Very often, the theme/rheme division will correspond to the syntactic distinction between subject and predicate, or between subject-plus-transitive-verb and object. It would be inaccurate to suggest that the notion of Functional Sentence Perspective was wholly unknown in American linguistics; some of the Descriptivists did use the terms “topic” and “comment” in much the same  way as Mathesius ‘s “theme” and “rheme”. But, apart from the fact that the Prague scholars developed these ideas rather further than any Americans ever did.

The modern Chomskyan School, however, lays great stress on the need for linguists´ statements to “explain” rather than merely “describe”, and it has no objection to the postulation of unobservables. A related point is that many Prague linguists were actively interested in questions of standardirizing linguistic usage. The American Descriptivists not only, quite rightly, drew a logical distinction between linguistic description and linguistic prescription, but furthermore left their followers in little doubt that prescription was an improper, unprofessional activity in which no respectable linguist would indulge.

The theory of theme and rheme by no means exhausts Mathesius’s contributions to the functional view of grammar; given more space.  Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the “Prague School”. We know Trubetzkoy`s ideas today chiefly through the book, Principles of Phonology in which he gives a central role to the phoneme; but Trubetzkoy, and the Prague School in general were interested primarily in the paradigmatic relation between phonemes, i.e. in 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. Trubetzkoy developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic contrast: e.g. he distinguished between (i) privative oppositions, in which two phonemes are identical except that one contains a phonetic “mark” which the other lacks, (ii) gradual oppositions in which the members differ in possessing different degrees of some gradient property, and (iii) equipollent oppositions, in which each member has a distinguishing mark lacking in the others. In some cases a given phonemic opposition will be suspended or “neutralized” in others. Trubetzkoy, in the Principles, establishes a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology –that is, a system which enables us to say what kind of phonology a language has, rather than simply treating its phonological structure in the take-it-or –leave-it American fashion as a set of isolated facts.

Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition. The obvious function – that of keeping different words or longer sequences apart – he called the distinctive function, but this is by no means the only function that a phonological opposition may serve. Consider the opposition between presence and absence of stress, for instance: there are perhaps rather few languages in which this is a regularly distinctive. In languages with more variable stress position, such as English or Russian, stress has less delimitative function and scarcely any distinctive function, but it has a culminative function: there is, very roughly speaking and ignoring a few “clitics”. Thus Trubetzkoy points out that in German, while the opposition between /j/ and other consonant phonemes has a distinctive function /j/, also has a delimitative function in that this consonant occurs only morphemic-initially. Conversely English /ŋ// has a “negative delimitative function”: when we hear that sound we know that there cannot be a morpheme boundary immediately before it.

Trubetzkoy, like other members of the Prague School, was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message. Trubetzkoy followed his Viennese philosopher colleague Karl Buhler, who distinguished between the representation function, the expressive function (that of expressing temporary or permanent characteristics of the speaker) and the conative function (that influencing the hearer).

Trubetzkoy shows that Buhler’s analysis can be applied in phonology. A phonetic opposition which fulfils the representation function will normally be a phonemic contrast; but distinctions between allophones of a given phoneme, where the choice is not determined by the phonemic environment, will often play an expressive or conative role.

Another manifestation of the Prague attitude that language is a tool which has a job (or, rather, a wide variety of jobs) to do is the fact that members of that school were much preoccupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use (Garvin 1964 provides an anthology of some of this work). Many American linguists, both Descriptivist’s and, even more so, those of the modern Chomskyan school, have by contrast maintained an almost puritanical  concentration on the formal, logical aspects of language to the exclusion of more humane considerations. This aspect of Prague School thought lies somewhat outside the purview of the present book. The Prague group constituted one of the few genuine points of contact between linguistics, and structuralism in the continental (nowadays mainly French) sense – a discipline whose contemporary practitioners often appeal to the precedent of linguistics in their approaches to literary criticism without, in many cases, really seeming to understand the linguistics concepts which they cite.

Bloomfieldians and Chomskyans disagree radically about the nature of science, but they are united in wanting to place linguistics firmly on the science side of the arts/science divide. The Prague School did not share this prejudice; they were not interested in questions of methodology, and it seems likely that, say, Mathesius in discussing the “characterology” of English would, if asked, have thought of his work as more akin to that of a physicist.

The therapeutic theory of sound-change. Mathesius, and following him various other members of the Prague School, had the notion that sound changes were to be explained as the result of a striving towards a sort of ideal balance or resolution of various conflicting pressures; for instance, the need for a language to have large variety of phonetic shapes available to keep its words distinct conflicts with the need for speech to be comprehensible despite inevitably inexact pronunciation, and at a more specific level the tendency in English.

The Prague School is in effect arguing that the atomicity which Saussure attributes to “diachronic” linguistics is not an intrinsic property of historical as opposed to synchronic linguistics but only of a particular school of linguists, who happened to be interested in historical rather than synchronic linguistics for reasons independent of their atomistic approach. The Prague School argues for system in diachronic too, and indeed it claims that linguistic change is determined by, as well as determining, synchronic état de langue.

One of the key concepts in Martinet’s account of sound-change is that of the functional yield of phonological oppositions. The functional yield of an opposition is, to put is simply, the amount of work it does in distinguishing utterance which are otherwise alike.

It is of course possible to defend the function-yield hypothesis by arguing that King and Wang have formalized the notion in an inappropriate way. But the onus is on proponents of the hypothesis to show this, and un any case there are phenomena in the history of the world’s language which seem so radically incompatible with Martinet’s hypothesis that no reformulation could conceivably avail against them.  In Chinese, morphemes and syllables are co-terminous, but modern Madarian has so few phonologically distinct syllables that on average each syllable is ambiguous as between three or four etymologically distinct morphemes in current use. A case such as English /faul/ would be unusual in Mandarian not because it permits alternative interpretations but because the number of alternatives is so small. The language has of course compensated for his loss of phonological distinctions. What has happened is that monomorphemic words have to a very large extent been replaced by compounds. But, unless we interpret Martinet as saying merely that a language will somehow maintain its usability as a means of communication, then Mandarian must surely refute him; the distinctions it has lost were of great functional yield. Mandarian strikingly vindicates Saussere’s view of the difference between diachronic and synchronic linguistics.

Perhaps this obituary for Martinet’s theory of sound-change is premature; one can think of ways in which some sort of rearguard action might be mounted in its defense.

The situation is rather different in the case of another theory evolved out of Prague School doctrines, namely Jakobson’s theory of phonological universals. Jakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle; in fact represents one of the very few personal links between European and American traditions of linguistics. He has written a great deal, for instance, on the structuralist approach to literature.

Speech sounds may be characterized in terms of a number of distinct and independent or quasi-independent parameters. Thus the height within the oral cavity of the highest point of the tongue is one articulatory parameter and the position of this point on the front/back scale is another parameter. Position of the soft palate is a third articulatory parameter. We may call the range of alternative choices provided by any parameter the values of that parameter.

One of the lessons of articulatory phonetics is that human vocal anatomy provides a very large range of different phonetic parameters.

The system of cardinal vowels divides up these continua in a discrete fashion: thus it provides for just four equidistant degrees of vowel aperture. 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 continous. Descriptivists tended to be reluctant to admit that any sound which can be found in some language might nevertheless be regarded as a relatively “difficult” sound in any absolute sense.

Jakobson, on the hand, is a phonological Tory. For him, only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role.

If the Jakobsonian “distinctive features” were equated directly with ordinary articulatory parameters, Jakobson’s theory would be obviously false since many more than twelve articulatory parameters are exploited by the languages of the world. An important part of the theory is that certain physically quite distinct articulatory parameters are psychologically equivalent as one might say.

The Jakobsonian feature “fat” represents inter-changeably each of the following articulatory parameter-values: lip-rounding, pharyngalization and retroflex articulation.

The definition of “fat” implies that whereas some languages distinguish labialized and plain stops, others distinguish pharyngalized and plain stop, and others again distinguish retroflex from alveolar or dental stops.

The notion that the universal distinctive features are organized into an innate hierarchy of relative importance or priority appears in a book with Jakobson published in the period between leaving Czechoslovakia and arriving in American. He makes the point, to begin with, that a study of children’s acquisition of language shows that the various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random order.

Jakobson then goes on the argue that this hierarchy of phonological features, which is established on the basis of data about children´s acquisitions of language, manifests itself also in comparative studies of adult languages and in the symptoms of aphasia.

In order to substantiate his belief that the phonological universal he discusses are determined by “deep” psychological principles rather than by relatively uninteresting facts about oral anatomy or the like, Jakobson devotes considerable space to discussion of synaesthetic effects: that is, cases where perception in one sensory mode (in this case, speech-sound) correlate with perceptions in another mode (Jakobson considers mainly associations of sounds with colours).

The difficulty with this aspect of Jakobsno’s work is that his evidence is highly anecdotal- he bases his “universals”; and one anecdote is always very vulnerable to a counter-anecdote.

This anecdotal quality in Jakobson´s argumentation applies not merely to his statements about synaesthesia but more generally to his claims about the distinctive features.

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

The Prague scholars were particularly interested in the way that a language provides a speaker with a range of speech-styles appropriate to different social setting. This aspect of their work has recently been developed into a rich and sophisticated theory by the American William Labov, formerly of Columbia University.

Labov´s work is based on recorded interviews with sizable samples of speakers o various categories in some speech-community, the interviews being designed to elicit examples of some linguistic from –a variable- which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community.

When we examine the age factor it emerges that historical changes is fuelled by social variation. Often, what a given speaker perceives as a difference between more and less socially prestigious styles of speech will coincide historically whit a different between newer and older usage, as speakers in each generation unconsciously modify their speech slightly in order to raise their social prestige.

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 – a point that seemed undeniable. The Prague School and, now, Labov, are among the linguists who have taken the social dimension of language most seriously; and they have ended by destroying Saussure´s sharp separation between synchronic and diachronic study.

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