the prague school 布拉格学派

The Prague School【Abstract】Modern linguistics has been divided into different schools, such as the Prague School, the London School and American Structuralism. This article is meant to introduce one of these schools----the Prague School generally.【Key Words】The Prague School linguistics Saussure theoriesSaussure has not had the time to do a detailed and in-depth research on structural linguistics because of his untimely death. But his theory is widespread via his students, especially his General Linguistics, influenced the field of linguistics a lot. Many western logisticians have been influenced by him, and then developed the Prague School and others. The Prague School practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics, and its most important contribution to linguistics is that it sees language in terms of function.There are generally three major points developed in Prague school: (1) It stressed the combination of the synchronic and diachronic study of language. (2) There was an emphasis on the systemic character of language. In other words, elements are held to be in functional contrast and opposition. (3)Language was looked on as functional in another sense, that is, as a tool performing a number of essential functions or tasks for the community using it.The Prague school is best known and remembered for its contribution to phonology and the distinction between phonetics and phonology. Following the Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, Trubetzkoy argued that phonetics belonged to parole while phonology belonged to langue. On this basis he developed the notion of “phoneme” as an abstract unit of the sound system as distinct from the sounds actually produced. In classifying distinctive features, there are nine OPPOSITIONS as follo ws:(1)Bilateral opposition: /p/ and /b/ share the features of “bilabial”.(2)Multilateral opposition: a more loosely established relationship. /a/ and /i/ for instance are alike only to the extent that both are vowels.(3)Proportional opposition: for example, not only /p/ and /b/, but also /t/ and /d/, and /k/ and /g/.(4)Isolated opposition: /v/ and /l/, the former is labial-dental fricative, the latter is lateral voiced, not shared by any other pair of phonemes.(5)Privative opposition: aspiration vs. lack of aspiration as between /p/ and /b/, nasalization vs. lack of nasalization as between /m/ and /b/.(6)Gradual opposition: /u/ and /o/(7)Equipollent opposition: /t/ and /p/, /t/ and /k/.(8)Neutralisable opposition: /p/ and /b/ do not contrast after /s/.(9)Constant opposition: the opposition between /t/ and/d/ is constant in all positions for consonants.Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), another theory inspired by the ideas of the Prague School, is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to an analysis of utterancesin terms of the information they contain. The principle is that the role of each utterance part is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole. Some Czech linguists devoted considerable attention to problem of analyzing sentences from a functional point of view. They believe that a sentence contains point of departure and a goal of discourse. The point of departure is equally present to the speaker and to the hearer, and is called the THEME. The goal of discourse presents the very information that is to be imparted to the hearer, and is called the RHEME. It is believed that the movement from the THEME to RHEME reveals the movement of the mind itself .Language may use different syntactic structures, but the order of ideas remains basically the same. Based on these observations, they created the notion of FSP to describe how information is distributed insentences.FSP deals particularly with the effect of the distribution of known information and new information in discourse. The known information refers to information that is not new to the reader or hearer. The new information is what is to be transmitted to the reader or hearer. The theory of FSP is concerned with the distribution of information as determined by all meaningful elements, from intonation (for speech) to context. A central feature of FSP is communicative dynamism. J. Firbas discusses the distribution of the degrees of communicative dynamism(CD) over sentence elements, which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence. He examines also the relation of theme and rheme to, and implementation by, syntactic components. Special attention is paid to the relation between FSP and word order. The second part of the book deals with spoken communication and considers the place of intonation in the interplay of FSP factors, establishing the concept of prosodic prominence. It tackles the relationship between the distribution of degrees of communicative dynamism as determined by the interplay of the non-prosodic FSP factors and the distribution of degrees of prosodic prominence as brought about by intonation.No doubt that the Prague School is one of the successful examples. It indeed can be said to “have influenced every important development in the United States” and has been stated that “No other European group has wielded quite as much influence as this one”. (Bolinger, 1968)【References】(1) Abercrombie, David. 1963. Studies in phonetics and linguistics, London: OxfordUniversity Press.(2) Language and linguistics, 2000—2010. Oxford: Pergamon.(3) Culler, J. 1976. Saussure. London: Fontana/Collins.(4) Rosch. 1975. Cognitive Representations of Semantic Categories. Journal ofexperimental psychology: general. 104: 192-233。