The prague phological school

1.2. Functional linguistics: The Prague School

• Prague linguists, on the other hand, looked at languages as one might look at a motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others. As long as they were describing the structure of a language, the practice of the Prague School was not very different from that of their contemporaries- they used the notions phoneme and morpheme, for instance; but they tried to go beyond description to explanations, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.
• One fairly straightforward example of functional explanation in Mathesius own work concerns his use of terms commonly translated theme and rheme, and the notion which has come to be called Functional Sentence Perspective by recent writers working in the Prague tradition. Most sentences are uttered in order to give the hearer some information; but obviously we do not produce unrelated pieces of information chosen at random, rather we carefully tailor our statements with a view not only to what we want the hearer to learn but also to what he already knows and to the context of discourse which we have so far built up.

Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition:

• Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition:
• *Distinctive function: The obvious function that of keeping different words or longer sequences apart.
• *Delimitative function: It helps the hearer locate word-boundaries in the speech signal.
• *Negative delimitative function: When we hear that sound we know that there can’t be a morpheme boundary immediately before it.
• *Culminative function: Perception of stress tells the hearer how, any words he must segment the signal into, although it does not tell him where to make the cuts.
• Each of the three phonological functions has to do with enabling the hearer to work out what sequence of words has been uttered by the speaker.
• Karl distinguished another three functions:
• *Representation function: Starting facts.
• *Expressive function: Expressing temporary or permanent characteristics of the speaker.
• *Conative function: Influencing the hearer.
• Vowel duration is a respect in which RP and standard American English differ markedly in their phonological structure.
• *In RP, vowel duration is phonologically determined.
• *In American English, vowel duration has no distinctive function and is always free to vary, and length is used to engage the emotions of the hearer.