The Prague School

The Prague School appears in 1926, it practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics; Saussure contrasted synchronic linguistics as the study of a system in which the various elements derive their values from their mutual relationships from historical linguistics as the description of a sequence of isolated, unsystematic events.

 Jakobson and Trubetzkoy were two of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. They worked in the study of different aspects of language but they were focused in the phonic field. They distinguish the phonetic and phonology.

 The phonology we can apply the structuralism`s ideas because has as object`s study the sounds (phoneme), they are innumerable. Phoneme is the mental image of a sound and belongs to the plane of the tongue. The phoneme is the addition of phonetic properties simultaneous in which the sound is different one from the other.

According to Jakobson the phonemes can give different articulatory realization that it is name allophone. These are studied phonetics and speeches belong to the plane. According to this school`s phonologists the phonemes of a language form a structure in which each of them have a value that is given by opposition with the rest of phonemes, to form a system. The introduction or loss of a phoneme can alter the whole phonological system.

Trubetzkoy developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic contrast; he distinguishes between privative opposition, in which two phonemes are identical except that one contains a phonetic mark which the other lacks; gradual opposition in which the members differ in possessing different degrees of some gradient property; equipollent oppositions in which each member has a distinguishing mask lacking in th others. The archiphoneme is the highest common factor of the phonemes whose opposition is neutralized.

 Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition. Distinctive function keeps different words or longer sequences apart; delimitative function it helps the hearer locate word-boundaries in the speech signal; culminative function there is, very roughly speaking and ignoring a few clitics such as a and the, one and only one main stress per word in English.

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