Prague Linguistic Circle

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The Prague Linguistic Circle or "Prague school" (French Cercle linguistique de Prague, Czech Pražský lingvistický kroužek) was an influential group of literary critics and linguists in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis during the years 1928–1939. It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. After World War II, the circle was disbanded but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian—later Hallidean—linguistics).

History

The group's work before World War II was published in the Travaux Linguistiques and its theses outlined in a collective contribution to the World's Congress of Slavists. The Travaux were briefly resurrected in the 1960s with a special issue on the concept of center and periphery and are now being published again by John Benjamins. American scholar Dell Hymes cited his 1962 paper, "The Ethnography of Speaking," as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to American linguistic anthropology. The group's Czech work is published in Slovo a slovesnost. English translations of the Circle's seminal works were published by the Czech linguist Josef Vachek in several collections.

Members

The Prague linguistic circle included Russian émigrés such as Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevskiy, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský. The instigator of the circle and its first president was the eminent Czech linguist Vilém Mathesius (President of PLC until his death in 1945).

Roman Jakobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson, (Russian, Роман Осипович Якобсон), (11 October 1896 – 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary critic, associated with the Formalist school. He became one of the most influential linguists of the twentieth century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art.

Jakobson was one of the most important intellectuals in the humanities during the twentieth century. He began as one of the founding members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which was one of two groups responsible for the development of Russian Formalism, which influenced the entire field of literary criticism. Jakobson then moved to Prague, where he helped to form the Prague Linguistic Circle, which helped to influence the development of structuralism, one of the dominant movements in the humanities and social sciences of the era. Perhaps Jakobson's most enduring contribution was his development of the model of the communication theory of language based on his delineation of language functions.

For a short time in 1920, Jakobson became a professor of Russian in Moscow.

That same year, Jakobson moved, with his Moscow colleague, N.S. Trubetskoy, to Prague to continue his doctoral studies. There he met Vilem Mathesius and other Czech and Russian linguists, among them Sergei Karcevskiy, a professor of Russian at Geneva University who introduced the work of influential Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to Prague. While there, they all wanted to establish a discussion club or a group and, eventually, on October 26, 1926, the Prague Linguistic Circle (the predecessor of Prague School of Linguistics) was born.

Jakobson and colleagues from the Circle started as functionalists, analyzing semiotic systems in relation to social functions, such as communication rather than treating them purely as autonomous forms (in contrast to Saussure).

While they were known for their identification of the "distinctive features" of language, these theorists also explored culture and aesthetics. In fact, Jakobson (who, contrary to Trubetskoy, insisted that language is a way of the preservation and self-understanding of culture) considered language to be a means of the expression and development of culture.

In 1928, Jakobson, with his colleagues of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Vilem Mathesius, Nikolaj S. Trubetzkoy and S.I. Karcevskij, announced a radical departure from the classical structural position of Ferdinand de Saussure. They suggested that their methods of studying the function of speech sounds could be applied both synchronically, to a language as it exists, and diachronically, to a language as it changes.


Nikolai Trubetzkoy

Prince Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (Russian: Николай Сергеевич Трубецкой (or Nikolai Trubetzkoy) (April 15, 1890 – June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics.

Having graduated from Moscow University (1913), Trubetskoy delivered lectures there until the revolution in 1917. Thereafter he moved first to the university of Rostov-na-Donu, then to the university of Sofia (1920–22), and finally took the chair of Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna (1922–1938). On settling in Vienna, he became a geographically distant member of the Prague Linguistic School.

Trubetzkoy's chief contributions to linguistics lie in the domain of phonology, particularly in analyses of the phonological systems of individual languages and in search for general and universal phonological laws. His magnum opus, Grundzüge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology), was issued posthumously and translated into virtually all main European and Asian languages. In this book he famously defined the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from phonetics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology.

René Wellek

René Wellek (August 22, 1903—November 10, 1995) was a Czech-American comparative literary critic. Wellek, along with Erich Auerbach, is remembered as an eminent product of the Central European philological tradition. He studied literature at the Charles University in Prague, and was active among the Prague School linguists, before moving to teach in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 1935, later part of University College, London.

Jan Mukařovský

Jan Mukařovský (11 November 1891, Písek – 8 February 1975, Prague) was a Czech literary theoretic and aesthetician. During his time as professor at the Charles University of Prague he became well known for his association with the early structuralism as well as with the Prague Linguistic Circle, and for his development of the ideas of Russian formalism. Mukařovský had a profound influence on structuralist theory of literature comparable to that of Roman Jakobson.

Vilém Mathesius

Vilém Mathesius (August 3, 1882 – April 12, 1945) was a Czech linguist, co-founder of the influential Prague School of Linguistics. Mathesius lived and worked in Prague during the early part of the twentieth century, when the city, and indeed the nation of Czechoslovakia, functioned as a haven for intellectuals in Central Europe. His early work pioneered the synthesis of the synchronic approach to studying a language as it exists at one point in time, and the diachronic approach studying the history and development of a language over time. In this way, Mathesius was able to maintain the importance of function in communication, and was not limited to Ferdinand de Saussure's static structural model of language. Together with other linguists, such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy in the Prague circle, Mathesius developed "topical structure analysis" as a method of studying the semantic relationships between sentence topics and the overall topic of the discourse. Thus, Mathesius' work maintained a dynamic, or interactive, component, as the listener or reader is in a continuous relationship with the text, interpreting each individual sentence or unit in the context of the whole discourse.

In 1920, Mathesius met Roman Jakobson and came into contact with a different tradition. Soon, other Russian linguists came to Prague: P.N. Bogatyrev, S.I. Kartsevsky, and Nikolai Trubetzkoy. Kartsevsky, who was a professor of Russian at Geneva University, introduced and brought knowledge of the work of Ferdinand de Saussure to Prague. Contacts were also established with German linguists H. Becker and F. Slotty.

These linguists were joined by B. Trnka, B. Havranek, and Jan Mukarovsky. They wanted to establish a discussion club or a group, and this came about following the lecture by Henrik Becker entitled "Der europaische Sprachgeist" on October 26, 1926, when the Prague Linguistic Circle was born.

Their, at first, irregular meetings consisting of lectures and discussions gradually developed into regular ones, to presentations at conferences, and publications that made it one of the most influential schools of linguistic thought.


References
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  • Hymes, Dell. 1962. Prague Functionalism. American Anthropologist 82(2): 398.
  • Steiner, P. (ed). 1983. The Prague School 1929-1946. Poetics Today. (4)1
  • Doubravová, J. The ‘Cercle Linguistique de Prague" and the "Wiener Kreis." Charles U., Prague.
  • Nekula, M. 2003. Prague Structuralism: Methodological Fundamentals. Heidelberg: Winter Publications. ISBN 3825314863
  • Fried, Vilem. 1972. Prague School of Linguistics and Language Teaching. Oxford University Press. IBSN 0194370488
  • Toman, Jindrich. 1995. The Magic of a Common Language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 0262200961
  • Hajicova, Eva. 2002. Prague Linguistics Circle Papers: Travaux Du Cercle Linguistique De Prague N.S. John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 158811175X

External links


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