Historical Linguistics (4)The Prague SchoolThe London School

Dr. Ansa Hameed

Previously….

• History of Linguistics• Prelude• Structuralism: Saussure• Transformational Generative Grammar:

Chomsky• Functionalism: Halliday

Today’s Lecture

• The Prague School: Turbetzkoi, Jackobson• The London School: Mallinowski, Firth,

Halliday• Relational Grammar: Perlmutter, Postal

The Prague School

• The Prague School (1926): Functionalism• A group of literary critics and linguists in

Prague • Proponents: Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Roman

Jakobson, Sergei Karcevskiy• Focus:1. “Language in terms of function”2. “Sound system Analysis i.e. Phonology”

The Prague School: Major Ideas

1. Developed Distinctive Feature Analysis of sounds: each distinctive sound in a language is composed of a number of contrasting articulatory and acoustic features

2. Phonology is different from phonetics (Trubetzkoy)3. Defined Phoneme as a smallest distinctive unit of

any language (Trubetzkoy)4. Found Morpho-phonology (Trubetzkoy)5. Phonology is an independent discipline (Jakobson)

6. They stressed the function of elements within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts thus developed techniques for analysis of language system (Jakobson)

7. Presented some ideas regarding first language acquisition (Jakobson)

8. Described communication functions of language (Jakobson) (PTO)

Communication Functions of Language (Jakobson)

Referential: Describes a situation, object, mental stateThe autumn leaves have fallen.

Expressive: exemplified by interjections that do not alter the meaning but add information concerning the speakers’ internal stateWow, What a wonderful view!

Conative: engages the addressee directly (makes use of vocative and imperative)Come inside and finish your work.

Poetic: A message for its own sake (poetry, slogans)L’Oreal …. Because you worth it.

Phatic: language for the sake of interaction, greetings and general chit-chatGood morning, It’s a lovely day today!

Metalingual: use of language to describe and analyze itself

The London School

• Originator: John R. Firth (British linguist)

• Firth was influenced by the anthropologist B. Malinowski (1884–1942). In turn, he influenced his student, the well-known linguist M. A. K. Halliday. The three men all stressed the importance of context of situation and the system aspect of language. Thus, London School is also known as systemic linguistics and functional linguistics.

The London School: Malinowski

Malinowski’s theories

• Malinowski regards language “a mode of action, rather than as a counterpart of thought”. According to him, the meaning of an utterance does not come from the ideas of the words comprising it but from its relation to the situational context in which the utterance occurs.

• Malinowski believed that utterances and situation are bound up inextricably with each other and the context of situation is indispensable for the understanding of the words. The meaning of spoken utterances could always be determined by the context of situation.

• He distinguished three types of context of situation: (1) situations in which speech interrelates with bodily activity; (2) narrative situations; and (3) situations in which speech is used to fill a speech vacuum – phatic communion.

The London School: Firth

Firth’s theoriesFirth’s major contributions to linguistics:

• Firth started the branch called linguistic semantics. He put forward the idea that in analysing a typical context of situation, one has to take into consideration both the situational context and the linguistic context of a text:

(1) The internal relations of the text itself• (a) the syntagmatic relations between the elements in the structure;• (b) the paradigmatic relations between units in the system.(2) The internal relations of the context of situation• (a) the relations between text and non-linguistic elements, and the general

effects;• (b) the analytical relations between words, parts of words, phrases and the

special elements of the context of situation

• Firth also listed a model in his Papers in Linguistics (1957) that covers both the situational context and the linguistic context of a text: (1) the relevant features of the participants: persons, personalities

• (a) the verbal action of the participants• (b) the non-verbal action of the participants

(2) the relevant topics, including objects, events, and non-linguistic, non-human events(3) the effects of the verbal action.

• Firth’s second important contribution to linguistics is his method of prosodic analysis called prosodic phonology.

• Firth did not define prosodic units. However, his discussion indicates that prosodic units include such features as stress, length, nasalisation, palatalisation, and aspiration.

The London School: Halliday

Halliday and Systemic-Functional Grammar

• M. A. K. Halliday (1925– ) has developed the ideas stemming from Firth’s theories in the London School. His Systemic-Functional (SF) Grammar is a sociologically oriented functional linguistic approach and one of the most influential linguistic theories in the twentieth century

• (Refer back to Lecture 27 for detail of SFL)

Relational Grammar• Developed by linguists David Perlmutter and Paul Postal in the

1970s and '80s • An alternative to transformational grammar• According to Blake (1990),

"Relational grammar represents a . . . reaction to early Transformational Grammar. It is not a single level theory, but a multilevel one in which the initial stratum is analogous to deep structure, and revaluations to transformations. The principle difference between the two approaches is that RG conceives of a sentence in terms of labeled relations borne to a predicate.”

Relational Grammar vs. TG

Explanation:• . For Chomsky there were derived notions: e.g. a subject

was defined as a noun phrase (NP) directly dominated, in a phrase structure tree, by a sentence node (S).

• In Relational Grammar they were taken as primitive. E.g. in the construction of Bill visited Mary, Bill and Mary are ‘terms’ which bear distinct ‘term relations’ (subject of, direct object of) to the verb. In the corresponding passive (Mary was visited by Bill), the object term (Mary) is promoted to subject, and so on.

Relational Grammar: Central Idea

• "The central idea of Relational Grammar is that there is a limited number of grammatical relations (Subject [SU], Direct Object [DO], and Indirect Object [IO]), such that one term can bear more than one such relation at different levels or 'strata' of the structure underlying the clause."(Simon, 1989)

• A syntactic theory • A theory of descriptive grammar in which syntactic operations (or

relationships, such as those between subject and object) rather than syntactic structures are used to define grammatical processes.

• It argues that primitive grammatical relations provide the ideal means to state syntactic rules in universal terms.

• Put another way, relational grammar (RG) conceives of a clause as a network of grammatical relations

• A clause might consist of a predicate, a subject, and a direct object.

• The relations are recognized by properties they display.

A crucial assumption of RG: Strata

• the description of a clause refers not only to its superficial structure but also to a deeper structure and possibly to several intermediate levels of structure. In RG, these levels are called strata

• the RG position is that there is no one stratum at which all the properties associated with subject or object hold; rather these are apportioned at different strata.

• Relations in the initial stratum are linked to semantic role (e.g., agent, patient; Rosen 1984), whereas relations in the final stratum determine more superficial phenomena like agreement and word order.

• The active sentence the committee recommended us has a single stratum, one in which the committee is subject and the pronoun us is direct object.

• The passive version, we were recommended by the committee, has, in addition, a second stratum in which we has been "advanced" to subject, and the committee "demoted" to an RG-specific relation called chomeur (= French "unemployed").

• (This terminology reflects the relational hierarchy, a ranking of grammatical relations: subject > direct object > indirect object > other.)

• Representation (PTO)

• Grammatical relations are represented by "1" = Subject, "2" = Direct Object, "Cho" = Chomeur, "P" = Predicate. Differences in word order and agreement between active and passive are due then to their different final strata.

universal principle of RG, the Stratal Uniqueness Law

• The demotion of the initial subject to chomeur in passive clauses reflects a universal principle of RG, the Stratal Uniqueness Law, which stipulates that a stratum may contain at most one subject, one direct object, and one indirect object. This law prevents the initial stratum subject in passive from persisting as subject when the direct object advances to subject.

• In RG terms, Every student gave the teacher a present involves advancement of an indirect object, the teacher, to direct object. As direct object, it may advance further to subject in the passive version, The teacher was given a present by every student. The Stratal Uniqueness Law prevents the initial direct object from persisting as such when the indirect object advances to direct object. This explains why it cannot passivize: *A present was given the teacher by every student.

Relational Grammar: Strata

According to Sampson• In Relational Grammar there are four strata of language

manifestation:1. Form/content2. Form/expression3. Substance/content4. Substance/expression• Thus ‘language consists of external relationships

between elements of different strata and internal relationship between elements in one strata’

Relational Grammar: What it’s Good for???

• RG played an important part in the evolution of syntactic theory from the 1970s to the 1980s.

• A number of ideas pioneered by RG were incorporated into other theories of the 1980s. The indispensability of grammatical relations has been a key assumption of LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR

Recap

• The Prague School: Turbetzkoi, Jackobson• The London School: Mallinowski, Firth,

Halliday• Relational Grammar: Perlmutter, Postal

References• Barry J. Blake, Relational Grammar. Routledge, 1990• Donnell, Mick O’. Introduction to Systemic Functional linguistics

for Discourse Analysis.2011.web.uam.es/departamentos/filoyletras/.../LFC-2011-Week1.pdf

• Halliday, M.A.K. (1994), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, London: Edward Arnold.

• Simon C. Dik, The Theory of Functional Grammar, Part 1: The Structure of the Clause. Walter de Gruyter, 1989

• Sriniwass, Sridevi. Methods and procedures for a Systemic Functional Linguistic Analysis: An investigation into clause complexing relations. jml.um.edu.my/filebank/published_article/.../2009_-_19_-_sridevi.p...