Prague Linguistic School (Functional Linguistics)

The Prague school of linguistics is represented by the names of Vilem Mathesius, Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetskoy, et al. The group favored the synchronic, or descriptive, approach to linguistics over the diachronic, or historical approach. It defined the phoneme -- the smallest unit of speech that can distinguish one word from another -- in terms of distinctive features. For instance, b and p are English phonemes, distinguishing such words as bin and pin, because voicing is a distinctive feature of English: b is voiced, p is voiceless. The basic contributions of this linguistic school are 1. The theory of the phoneme, 2.The theory of oppositions and the oppositional method (N.Trubetskoy), 3. The functional sentence perspective (or the theory of communicative dynamism), 4. The theory of the asymmetry of a linguistic sign ( S. Karčevsky).

American Descriptive Linguistics

Its main representatives are Leonard Bloomfield (the head), Charles Fries, Zelic Harris, Charles Hockett, etc. They rejected the traditional techniques of linguistic analysis. They studied the non-alphabetical languages of Indian tribes which differ considerably from Indo-European languages. These are incorporative languages. These linguists offered new procedures of description (arrangement, position, co-occurrence of linguistic elements) without resorting to meaning. Hence this school is called, at times, Behaviorist Structural Grammar (L. Bloomfield). According to behaviorists, language is just a form of behavior. Linguistics should focus on linguistic performance, it should study the behavior, distribution, arrangement, co-occurrence, structural characteristics of elements disregarding their meaning.

Transformational and Transformational Generative Grammar

In the early 50s one of the most influential structuralists Z. Harris (Pennsylvania) revolutionized linguistic analysis. At its earliest period Transformational grammar makes use of operations called transformations which systematically indicate links between various types of sentences and derive one type from another: passives are derived from actives. Corresponding actives and passives are equivalent in meaning but distant in structure.

There are two periods in the development of transformational grammar: Transformational Grammar and Transformational Generative Grammar.

Transformational grammar (Zelic Harris, Charles Hockett) distinguishes kernels and transformational rules for expansion and rearrangement of kernels. Kernels are simple naked sentences: The sun shines; She is beautiful; I have a car; I read a book; There is a book on the table, etc. All possible sentences are derived from kernels. There’s some connection between structure and meaning. Different structures can be identical in meaning: Jim drinks beer =>Beer is drunk by Jim. Formally identical structures may differ in meaning: He made Mary a star , He made Mary a toy, which can be seen transformationally(He made a star of Mary), He made a toy for Mary).

Transformational Generative Grammar is primarily associated with the name of N. Chomsky, USA, 1928 , linguist, philosopher and intellectualist, professor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Chomsky holds that humans are equipped at birth with innate language faculty to acquire language, which is a specific neurological system. Babies easily develop speech. These are rules that govern sequencing sounds into words and words into sentences. He initiated the shift from behaviorism and empiricism that dominated American linguistics to investigation into language and universal grammar. He criticized behaviorists. According to him, language is not a form of behavior. Linguists should focus on the underlying linguistic competence but not on linguistic performance. Generative grammar derives a surface structure from an abstract deep (underlying) structure. Surface are observable structures, deep are underlying structures, they are logical structures of our brains – subject and predicate structures.

Harris and Chomsky developed ideas of transformation in different contexts and for different purposes. For Harris transformation relates to surface structure sentence forms: Jim drinks beer => Beer is drunk by Jim. This transformation relates both structures, passive and active. For Chomsky transformation is a device to transform a deep structure into a surface structure, to show the generation of infinite living structures out of a finite set of deep structures ( I have a car. She is nice.., etc,). The theory of deep structures can serve as a method of analyzing and explaining the generation of surface structures. He married young is a surface structure with a double predicate, the nature of which can be explained transformationally =>He marries and =>He is young. The sentence with a simple nominal predicate can be analyzed as comprising two deep structures : She a beauty?! => She is a beauty. =>It is not true. Genitive constructions with semantically different genitives can be analyzed as John’s arrival => John arrives, or John arrived, or John will arrive. This method allows to see the difference between a subjective and an objective genitive: 1. Napoleon’s victory=> Napoleon wins a victory over smb; 2. Napoleon’s defeat=> Smb wins a victory over Napoleon. So we see that two identical surface structures may posses absolutely different meanings.