المساعد الشخصي الرقمي

مشاهدة النسخة كاملة : Prague School



سناء احمد
28-10-2010, 05:50 PM
what is called Prague School today is a body of linguists, recently grouped under the heading of the re-established
Cercle linguistique de Prague,
which represent several postwar generations of pupils of such masters of their trade as Vilém Mathesius, Vladimír Skalička, Bohuslav Havránek, Bohumil Trnka or Roman Jakobson. The body of the postwar and contemporary Prague scene, to name just a few, is made up of, next to those I have already mentioned, by such linguists as P. Trost, P. Sgall, M. Dokulil, F. Daneš, J. Firbas, K. Horálek, K. Hausenblas, M. Komárek, J. Krámský, P. Novák, E. Hajičová, O. Leška and others.

In what follows,
attention will be paid to various aspects of the LANGUAGE SYSTEM (or la langue) first, such as

opposition, centre-periphery distinction,
function, syntactic patterns and
language unit of several kinds (i.e. phoneme, morphoneme, nomination, lexeme, idiom, utterance)
and some related concepts.
In the second part, attention will be drawn to such aspects of the TEXT (or la parole) as dependency,
function,
valency,
topic-focus organization and some other matters. It should be stressed that, unlike mentalistic and speculative approaches, often based on very few examples from a single language,
Prague approaches are, as a rule, highly
empirical,

. Language System.
In contrast to the Chomskyan notion of competence, seen, basically, as a set of rules of an individual and suggesting both psychological and operational character of something which is, usually, not mentioned explicitly, Prague linguists take a rather different view, here. Following de Saussure, they understand the
language system
not only as a set of rules of an individual, but also as a hierarchical depository of all the building-blocks of language, i.e. of words and lexemes and other language units, shared by a body of speakers in general, out of which each individual speaker has made a somewhat personal selection (
nowadays called idiolect). Also the notion of the Chomskyan rules is felt to be inadequate in describing the situation in that it covers rules of grammar only and has, accordingly, to be complemented by a set of functions and a number of other types of rules (

socio-linguistic, pragmatic, semantic, stylistic and others), all of them being based on a different kind of convention. These are sometimes called, even today and for the sake of brevity, norms. Although this general and traditional concept of norm, which is yet to be explored in more depth, especially in its relation to pragmatics, has, among other things, a definite and obvious bearing on the notion of communicative function, too, there is yet another relationship to be brought to attention. Norm may also be understood as a model for syntagmatic combinations of many kinds in la parole. Recently, this usage of model has gained some frequency especially in syntax.

However, the notion of system, if reduced to its substance, is based on relations of many kinds, existing between its units (forms), which are best known as
oppositions;
every language unit is made of a unique
set of oppositions. While de Saussure never explicitly tried to specify them, Prague linguists did and their findings seem to have gained a general usage nowadays.
Trubeckoy's set of four types of distinctive oppositions, namely
bilateral-multilateral,
proportional-isolated,
privative-gradual-equipollent and
constant-neutralized/neutralizable is, perhaps, best known, but it is by no means exhaustive in its domain. Both he and others also considered other types, such as homogeneous-heterogenous, disjunctive-non-disjunctive, linear-non-linear, simple-complex, constant-not-constant or localized-non-localized, and, beside well-documented phonology, and they related these oppositions to morphology, lexicology and semantics as well as to suprasegmental tone differentiation and typology. Here, it is especially Jakobson's treatment of the case system which might serve as a well-known example. This development went on finding more complex relations, i.e. correlations. To try to enumerate here the number of the correlations found and described (some 40 types), correlation being a more complex concept closely related to opposition and dependence and suggesting a systematic occurrence, is just not possible, for they are too numerous.

It is precisely out of this intellectual relation-based orientation towards breaking structures of both the system and text into a finite set of relations and classifying them that yet another and powerful distinction arose, which found its full treatment and had some interesting consequences only after the last war.
This centre-periphery distinction is now generally understood as a continuous and gradual, scalar relation or, rather, opposition of what is on the one hand, generally
unmarked
and regular, used rather often and being primary or underived and of what is, on the other hand, marked and often irregular, of a lower frequency of use and secondary in its derivational nature. It goes without saying that this distinction, applied to all language strata or levels, exhibits a similar distribution of functional load: what is central in language, be it phonemes, morphemes, lexemes or sentence types, has a high functional load and vice versa. Undoubtedly, this distinction of centre-periphery has evolved from the influential idea of potentiality of language phenomena of V. Mathesius, an idea voiced even before de Saussure's Cours came out (more about it in 2.).

It is not really relevant, in this context, whether another major and highly employed notion of the Prague analysis, that of un/markedness, came into being before or after the centre-periphery distinction. What is relevant, however, is their mutual relation. The notion of markedness, applicable anywhere where at least a binary opposition is to be found, suggesting presence of a system feature in a form (unit) or structure and having thus a simple additional nature, seems to be so general as to be almost pre-theoretical in its nature. It is perhaps because of this that it has been so widely employed, and not only in linguistics.

A major Prague term of function brings the development of the original and simple notion of relation to its peak. Though de Saussure used the term rather occasionally, it has, nowadays, become an attribute of several linguistic schools, indeed. The notion of function, present in various approaches in more than one sense, has brought together traditional insular linguistic thinking and atomism with new external influences represented by semiotics, or specifically, by sign. In contradistinction to a quasi-mathematical Hjelmslevian view of the
Function
as a dependency
between functives or entities, the Prague conception of function is somewhat different, stressing that the functional relation is one between an entity or language unit and other units, or, rather, between a unit of a lower order and a higher unit or structure. This is why this view may often be explained as task or role played by an element in a structure (reserved originally for phonology only and called delimitative function) or in a paradigm
(distinctive function) etc.
Though the basis for this distinction was laid down before the 2nd world war already, a major development in the second sense of the term, that of the
communicative function, was yet to come in the postwar years. [Let me add, that it is perhaps due to my modest contribution in having translated to Czech both Omkring sprogteoriens grundlaeggelse and Cours de linguistique générale that some sort of recent bridge between Prague, Hjelmslev and de Saussure could have been re-established leading, e.g., to a recent introduction of Hjelmslev's notion of functive into some Prague contributions.]


Having based his system of six communicative functions on earlier ideas of K. Bühler, B. Malinowski and J. Mukařovský, R. Jakobson offered a whole new basis for viewing both oral and written texts comprehensively. What is important is that this comprehensive character also had a number of semiotic aspects, with the pragmatic one being quite prominent (though under a different label), reaffirming, yet again, the semiotic orientation of the Prague linguistics. A further development of the function in the first sense, i. e. of the distinctive function, is to be seen in a current dichotomy, used nowadays, of
structural function,
being generalized and extrapolated more or less directly from phonology, and
nominative function, being closely linked with semiotic aspects of the language denomination. Thus, a complementary set of la langue and la parole functions has been devised, incorporating their relation to sign and, in the ultimate view, to the extralinguistic reality.

The syntactic level has long been considered to be made up of more than one layer, the best-known picture, perhaps, being offered by the three-level approach (Daneš 1964) in which
grammatical structure of the sentence is distinguished from its
semantic structure and its
propositional (or textual) organization.
Attempts have also been made to postulate a level of subjective, mainly evaluational individual expression of the speaker's attitudes (Poldauf 1964), belonging, clearly, into pragmatics. Sometimes, a level of discourse or hypersyntax is postulated, too, representing early and some of the first attempts at text linguistics in Prague.

As to the language units
related to these levels, the traditional repertoir of the
phoneme,
morpheme,
morphoneme,
lexeme (word) and sentence
has been expanded to include new units in the lexicon and syntax. Thus lexicology operates, next to word and lexeme with the notion of (de)nomination, introduced by V. Mathesius. This term, linked explicitly with the nominative function of the language units, mentioned above, suggests an operational approach, on the speaker's part, to facts and ideas he wants to put in words in a sentence, primarily. Since many nominations are stable and repeatable, a number of them forms a part of the speaker's lexicon, or, rather, vocabulary. Viewed statically, they include, on the one hand, words or lexemes, but also idioms (phrasemes) and all of the set non-idiomatic combinations, including those which have a sentence character and which it is difficult to call lexemes (Filipec-Čermák 1985).

اسامة الزهراني
30-12-2011, 09:10 PM
السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته http://www5.0zz0.com/2007/12/07/20/61043092.gif http://www5.0zz0.com/2007/12/07/20/61043092.gif

Beauty
31-12-2011, 12:02 AM
thanx alot dear ...