Functional linguistics: the Prague School

Saussure´s lectures on synchronic linguistics were given in 1911, and that year, also saw the publication of Boas’s Handbook; coincidentally, it was in 1911 too that Mathesius published his first call for a new, non-historical approach to language study (Mathesius 1911).

Around Mathesius there came into being a circle of like-minded linguistic scholars, who began to meet for regular discussion from 1926 onwards, and came to be recognized as “the prague  school”.

The Prague School practiced a special style od synchronic linguistic, and although most of the scholars whom one thinks of as members of the school worked in Prague or at  least Czechoslovakia, the term is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered to the Prague style.

As long as they were describing the strucrure of a language, the practice of the Pargue 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 explanation, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.

American linguistic restricted themselves and still restrict themselves to description.

According to Mathesius, the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts, the theme which refrers to something about which the immediately preceding sentences, and the rheme, so that the peg may be established in the hearer´s mind bedore anything new has to be hung on it.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that the notion of functional sentence perspective was wholly unknow in American linguistic, some of the descriptivists did use the terms topic and comment in much the same way as Mathesius theme and rheme.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the Prague School not based I Czechislovakia. He belonged to a scholarly family of the Russian nobility: his father had been a professor of philosophy and rector of Moscow University.

Troubetzkoy was a member of an aristocratic family with a long and renowned intellectual tradition. His interest in ethnography and folklore was present since adolescence. At the age of fifteen, he published his first article in Ethnological Society in Moscow.Troubetzkoy was in its infancy essentially ethnological training, with special relevance of Russian folklore, Caucasian and Finno-Ugric. The influence of this discipline is observed in its interpretation of language as a product closely related to religion, folklore and culture in general.

In 1908 he was admitted to the philological-historical school of the University of Moscow. During this period, he trained in the study of Indo-European languages. Like other linguists of the time, made a stay in Germany during the years 1913-1914. In 1916, he taught Sanskrit at the University of Moscow, which temporarily abandoned in 1917 for health reasons. In the Caucasus surprised by the Bolshevik uprising.