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lunes, 5 de septiembre de 2011

Functional linguistics: The Prague School

Read about the following ideas:


The Prague School practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics.

The members of The Prague School thought of language as a whole as serving a purpose.

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.


 - They tried to go beyond description to explanations, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.


 Mathesius: theme and rheme. 

Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition: Distinctive function, delimitative function, culminative function.

Karl distinguished another three functions: Representation function, expressivefunction and conative function.

-Saussure contrasted two kinds of linguistics:
*Synchroniclinguistics: The study of a system in which the various elements derive their values from their mutual relationship.
*Historicallinguistics: The description of a sequence of isolated, unsystematic events.

- The Prague School argues for system in diachrony and it claims that linguistics change is determined by synchronic état de langue.

The Descriptivits´ approach to phonology might be described metaphorically as `democratic´.

Descriptivists tended to be reluctant to admit that any sound which can be found in some language might nevertheless be regarded as a relatively `difficult´ sound in any absolute sense.


One of the characteristic of the Prague approach to language was readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative “systems”, “registers”, or “styles”, where American Descriptivist tended to insist on treating a language as single unitary system.  

And the Prague scholars were particularly interested in the way that a language provides a speaker with a range of speech-styles appropriate to different social settings.
  

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