In this paper, we explain the main phonological an grammatical contributions in linguistics from the School of Prague

1. FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS:
THE PRAGUE SCHOOL
Neyda Noheli Alvarez Avila
Luis Angel De León Rangel
Ricardo Misael García
Luis Pablo Tamez Sarmiento

2. VILÉM MATHESIUS
 Vilém Mathesius (1882-1945) was a
Czech Anglicist who studied and
taught at the Caroline University of
Prague.
 In 1911, Matheusius published his
first call for a new, non-historical
approach to language study.

3. Prague School American Descriptivists
It saw language in terms of
function.
They analized language with a A grammar is a set of elements
view of showing the functions
played by the different
components.
They looked in languages and They restricted to description.
explanation to why languages
were the way they were.
Use of terms „theme‟ and Use the terms „topic‟ and
„rheme‟. „comment‟
Were interested in standarizing Drew a distinction between
linguistic usage. linguistic description and
linguistic prescription.

4. NIKOLAI TRUBETZKOY
 Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich
Trubetzkoy (1890-1938)
was one of the members of
the “Prague School” not
based in Czechoslovakia.
 He was a student of Indo-
European linguistics at his
father‟s university.

5.  Trubetzkoyan phonology gives a central role to the
phoneme; Trubetzkoy, and the Prague School in
general, where intersted primarily in the
paradigmatic relation between phonemes.
 In the Principles, establishes a rather sophisticated
system of phonological typology, 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.

6. TRUBETZKOY
Types of phonemic contrast
Privative Gradual Equipollent
oppositions oppositions oppositions
Two phonemes are
The members Each member has
identical except
differ in processing a distinguishing
that one contains a
different degrees of mark lacking in the
phonetic „mark‟
some gradient others.
which the other
property.
lacks.

7.  Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can
be served by a phonological opposition:
 Delimitative function: it helps the hearer locate
word-boundaries in the speech signal, which is
something he needs to do if he is to make sense of
what he hears.
 Culminative function: it tells the hearer how many
words he must segment the signal into, although it
does not tell him where to make the cuts.

8.  In analyzing the functions of speech Trubetzkoy
followed his Viennese philosopher colleague Karl
Bühler, who distinguished between:
 Representation function.
 Expressive function.
 Conative function.

9. ANDRÉ MARTINET
 Martinet himself never lived in prague:
he was appointed to the École Practique
des Hautes Études in Paris in 1938.
 He was heavily influenced by Prague
thinking from an early stage in his
career, and nowadays it seems fair to
describe him as the chief contemporary
proponent of mainstream Prague ideas.
 The book “Économie des Changements
Phonétiques” in 1955, Marinet set out
his theories of diachronic phonology
most fully.

10.  One of the key concepts in Martinet´s account of
sound-change is that of the funtional yield of a
phonological opposition.
wreath – wreathe foal - vole
/writ/ - /wrerat/ /foul/ - /fvoul/

11. MANDARIN CHINESE
 The history in Mandarin Chinese has been one of
repeated massive losses of phonological
distinctions: final strops dropped, the voice contrast
in initial consonants was lost, final m merged with n,
the vowel system was greatly simplified.
 The modern Mandarin has so few phonologically
distinct syllables that on average each syllable is
ambiguos as between three or four etymologically
distinct morphemes in current use.

12.  Roman Osipovich Jakobson
(1896) was a Russian scholar.
From the 1920s onward he
studied and taught in Prague ,
and move to a chair in the
university of Brno.
 Jakobson‟s intellectual interests
are broad and reflect those of
the Prague School as a whole;
he has written a great deal, for
instance, on the structuralist
approach to literature. The
most important aspect of
Jakobson‟s work is his
phonological theory.

13.  As Trubestzkoy, he is interested in the analysis of
phonemes into their components features rather
than in the distribution of phonemes. but his view
represent a special development which takes to
their logical extreme ideas that are found only
briefly and tentatively adumbrated in the work of
Jakobson‟s approach to phonology is the notion
that there is a relatively simple, orderly, universal,
„psychological system‟ of sounds underlying the
chaotic wealth of different kind of sound observed
by the phonetician.

14.  In the text is described some articulatory
parameters as the „close‟, „open‟ parameters of a
vowel and „front‟ „back‟ too. The word „feature‟ is
used ambiguously by various writers to mean either
„parameter‟ or „parameter-value‟ (And Bloomfield
even used it in third term „minimum unit of
distinctive sound-feature‟.

15.  The articulatory phonetics‟ lesson is that human
vocal anatomy provides a very large range of
different phonetic parameters.
 English distinguished three degrees of aperture in
pure vowels, as in Pit/pet/pat; in French are 4 and
is said that Tswana have six.
 The Descriptivist‟s tended to see all phonetic
parameters and all sounds as intrinsically equal in
their potential for use in language. This approach to
phonology might be described metaphorically as
„democratic‟.
 At Jacobson‟s view, only a small group of phonetic
parameters seem to play a linguistically distinctive
role.

16.  Jacobson published a book were he described the
twelve „distinctive features‟ called Preliminaries to
Speech Analysis (1952).
 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 effect.
 To probe his paper he based in the German
psychologist K. Langenbeck, who suggested that he
„saw‟ the vowel as red because the first toy Wagen he
was given was red one: if this were the reason, the
universality of these sound/color correspondences
would be inexplicable.