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Prague School of Linguistics
Prague School of Linguistics
It pertains to the people who have invented particular theories of linguistics and those who have followed them. For example, the traditional grammar school, the European structuralist school, the American structuralist school, the transformational-generative school, the Prague school, the London school, the Geneva school, the Moscow school, the modern functional school, and many others.
1989 :After the political changes, the Circle's activity was slowly renewed.
REN WELLEK Early member of the Circle helped spread their way of linguistics to America. He was a CzechAmerican comparative literary critic.
Russian thinker who helped form the Moscow Linguistic Circle before moving to Prague. The vice president of Prague Linguistic Circle.
PRINCE NIKOLAY SERGEYEVICH TRUBETZKOYA Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics.
JAN MUKAOVSKHe is well known for his association with early structuralism as well as with the Prague Linguistic Circle, and for his development of the ideas of Russian formalism.
function by virtue of which linguistic forms are opposed to, or differentiated from, each other. The minimal linguistic form that is meaningful, or the minimal significant unit, is known as a moneme, which consists in the association between a signifier (vocal expression) and a signified (semantic content).
whereby speakers convey to listeners their state of mind (real or feigned) without resorting to the use of an additional moneme or monemes.
PHONEMIC CONTRAST
Privative oppositions, in which two phonemes are identical except that one contains a phonetic mark which the other lacks e.g. /f/ and v/, the mark in this case being voice. Gradual oppositions in which the members differ in possessing different degrees of some gradient property e.g. /I/, /e/ and /ae/ with respect to the property of vowel aperture. Equipollent oppositions in which each memberhas a distinguishing mak lacking in the others e.g. /p/, /t/ and /k/.
FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS
-refers to the study of the form of language in reference to their social function in communication. It considers the individual as a social being and investigates the way in which she/he acquires language and uses it in order to communicate with others in her or his social environment. The Prague linguistics 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. They used the notion of phoneme and morpheme, for instance; but they tried to go beyond descriptions to explanation, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.
STRUCTURALISM IN LITERATURE
In literary studies as in linguistics the term structuralism was invented during the early 1930s by Jakobson, Mukarovsky, and their colleagues of the Prague Linguistic Circle. The approach to literature which they advocated rested on the simple proposition that the individual work should be treated as a structure. By which they meant the sum of the interrelations of its parts, and that the significance of these different parts could not be considered outside their relationship with the whole.