FUNCTIONALISM FUNCTIONALISM

By:Ilienne Colina

Lidis PalominoOsmel AnzolaTomás Torres

República Bolivariana de VenezuelaUniversidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador

Instituto Pedagógico de BarquisimetoDr. Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa

Functionalism In linguistics, this is the approach to language study that is concerned with the functions performed by language, primarily in terms of cognition, expression, and conation. Especially associated with the Prague school and the Copenhagen School, this approach focuses on how elements in various languages accomplish these functions, both grammatically and phonologically.

Functionalism considers the individual as a social being and investigates the way in which she/he acquires language and uses it in order to communicate with others in her or his social environment.

Prague School (1928-1939)

Vilém MathesiusNikolai Trubetzkoy

Roman Jakobson

(Founder)(Main Representative)

(Contributor)

Prague School 1928-1939 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, this group separated but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism.

It included among its most prominent members the Russian linguist Nikolay Trubetscoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jacobson

-Function in the Prague conception

-The concept of opposition

-The notion of neutralization: archiphoneme

-The theory of Markedness

-Recent contribution: Theme and Rheme

The Prague School Contributions

Trubetzcoy

Jacobson

Vilém Mathesius

He was the founder of the Prague School and who formulated the principles of the functional study of languages which became fundamental for the formation of the methodology of the Prague Structuralism, whose most_prominent_representatives, Roman Jakobson and René Wellek, influenced generations of scholars in literary theory, linguistics and comparative literature.

Copenhague School(1931-nowdays)

Louis Hjelmslev (Founder)

Viggo Brondal

(Main Representative)Hans Jørgen Uldall

(Contributor)(Founder)

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Copenhague School (1931-nowadays)

Officially the “Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen” is a group of scholars dedicated to the study of linguistics.

It was founded by Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) and Viggo Brondal (1887–1942). It is centered on the linguistic theories developed by Hjelmslev, and later formed into the "Copenhagen school of functional linguistics".

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Louis Hjelmslev

Was a Danish linguist who founded the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Together with Hans Jorgen Uldall he developed a structural theory of language which he called Glossematics, which developed the Semiotic Theory of Ferdinand de Saussure.

He introduced the terms glosseme, ceneme, prosodeme and plereme as linguistic units, analogous to phoneme, morpheme etc.

His most famous work, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, is mostly concerned with the formal definition of a terminology for the analysis of any level of a system of signs, and as such there exists an exclusively Hjelmslevian terminology for that.

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The principal ideas of the school are:

-A language consists of content and expression.

-A language consists of a succession and a system.

-Content and expression are interconnected by commutation.

-There are certain relations in the succession and the system.

- There are no one-to-one correspondents between content and expression, but the signs may be divided into smaller components.

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Glossematics

The term was coined by Louis Hjelmslev and Hans Jørgen Uldall; glosseme was a neologism deriving from the Greek word  glossa  meaning "tongue". It is the structuralist linguistic theory of the twentieth century which defines the glosseme as the most basic unit or component of language. The glosseme is defined as the smallest irreductible unit of both the content and expression planes of language; in the expression plane, the glosseme is said to be identical or nearly identical to the phoneme, whereas it is stressed that traditional analyses have not adequately revealed the basic units of the content plane of languages.

(In the middle of the 1930's)

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Generativism

Noam Chomsky

( Late in the 1950s - nowdays)

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Chomsky`s Theory

-Chomsky distinguished the unrderlying knowledge of language from the way language is actually used in practice.

-According to him, Language performance may be affected by such things as attention, stamina, memory, etc.

-Therefore a theory of language should be a theory of competence. Once a full theory is developed, it can be integrated into a theory of performance, which will also consider other cognitive abilities

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Competence

-Competence is a person`s underlying (subconscious) linguistic ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences she/he has never heard before.

-It`s a person`s acquaintance with a set of grammatical rules and is different from the actual linguistic activities.

-Linguistic competence includes components such as phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and morphology.-Competence enables native speaker to recognize ambiguos sentences or accept even apparently meaningless sentences as syntactically correct (and even making some sense).

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Performance

-Perfromance is the real world linguistic output.

-May accurately reflect competence, but it also may include speech errors.

-Performance may be flawed because of memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) or other psychological factors.

- Represents only a small sample of possible utterances.

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Generativism

Known also as Generative Grammar, it is a set of rules proposed by Noam Chomzky that provide a framework for all the grammatically possible sentences in a language, excluding those which would be considered ungrammatical.

The classical Generativism consists of four elements:

1.- A limited number of nonterminal signs.

2.- A beginning sign which is contained in the limited number of nonterminal signs.

3.- A limited number of terminal signs

4.- A finite set of rules which enable rewriting nonterminal signs as strings of terminal signs.

( Late in the 1950s - nowdays)

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Historical development of models

of transformational grammar

Standard Theory (1957–1965)

Extended Standard Theory (1965–1973)

Revised Extended Standard Theory (1973–1976)

Relational grammar (1975–1990)

Government and binding/Principles and parameters theory (1981–1990)

Minimalist Program (1990–present)

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Systemic Functional Linguistics

Michael Halliday

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Systemic Functional Linguistics

It is an approach to linguistics that considers language as a social semiotic system. It was developed by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of system from his teacher, J R Firt.

For Halliday, all languages involve three very generalized functions, or metafunctions:

1.-Construing experience (meanings about the world).

2.- Enacting social relations (meanings concerned with interpersonal relations)

3.-The weaving together of these functions to create text.

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