FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS The Prague School

FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS: THE PRAGUE SCHOOL

Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius. It included among its most prominent members the Russian linguist Nikolay Trubetskoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson; the school was most active during the 1920s and ’30s.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (Russian; Moscow, April 16, 1890 - Vienna, June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology.

A manifestation of Prague attitude that language is a tool which has a job to do the fact that members of that School were much preoccupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use.
Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology.

Functions of language determined for six factors:
1. REFERENTIAL
Focus on context. We Use it when we intend to convey information without making judgments about it or pretend reactions of the addresser.
Context: Referent, about what?

2. EMOTIVE
-Produce an impression of certain emotion.
-Expressive.
Addresser: Speaker, narrator, author.

3. CONATIVE
-It finds its purest grammatical expression in the vocative and imperative.
- Appellative, ordering, begging
Addressee: Hearer, reader, viewer, user

4. PHATIC
- Emphasis on contact. Ex/Hello, are you angry?
- A profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication.
Contact: Channel of communication, physical connection

5. METALINGUAL
- Focus on code.
- Whenever the addresser an/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code.
Code: System.

6. POETIC
- Focus on the message for its own sake.
- As literature
Message: Text, discourse, what is being said