The Prague School of Thought – Dell Hymes

Dell Hymes

Dell Hathaway Hymes (June 7, 1927 in Portland, Oregon – November 13, 2009 in Charlottesville, Virginia) was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use.

Influence on his work

Hymes’ career can be divided into at least two phases. In his early career Hymes adapted Prague School Functionalism to American Linguistic Anthropology, pioneering the study of the relationship between language and social context. Together with John Gumperz, Erving Goffman and William Labov, Hymes defined a broad multidisciplinary concern with language in society.

Hymes’ later work focuses on poetics, particularly the poetic organization of Native American oral narratives. He and Dennis Tedlock defined ethnopoetics as a field of study within linguistic anthropology and folkloristics. Hymes considers literary critic Kenneth Burke his biggest influence on this latter work, saying, “My sense of what I do probably owes more to KB than to anyone else”. Hymes studied with Burke in the 1950s. Burke’s work was theoretically and topically diverse, but the idea that seems most influential on Hymes is the application of rhetorical criticism to poetry.

Hymes has included many other literary figures and critics among his influences, including Robert Alter, C. S. Lewis, A. L. Kroeber, Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Functionalism

This first school of thought focuses on how language is actually used in everyday life. Those who abide by functionalism look at language as just another tool for humans to use, and thus tend to focus on the function language and its different parts have in our lives. The theories of functionalism focus on phonological, semantic, syntactic, as well as the pragmatic functions of language. Functionalism emphasizes the importance of social context, usage, and the communicative function of the grammar, phonology, orthography, and more, of a language.However, Structuralism is an approach to linguistics that focuses on the idea that languages are fixed systems made up of many different units that connect with each other

The Prague School of Thought

What is now generally referred to as the Prague school comprised a fairly large group of scholars, mainly European, who, though they may not themselves have been members of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, derived their inspiration from the work of Vilém Mathesius, Nikolay Trubetskoy, Roman Jakobson and other scholars based in Prague in the decade preceding World War II.

The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle was an influential  group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague.  The Prague School has had a significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. Following the Czechoslovak coup d’état of 1948, the circle was disbanded in 1952, but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism.

American scholar Dell Hymes cites his 1962 paper, “The Ethnography of Speaking,” as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to American linguistic anthropology.

In 1929 the Circle promulgated its theses in a paper submitted to the First Congress of Slavists. “The programmatic 1929 Prague Theses, surely one of the most imposing linguistic edifices of the 20th century, incapsulated [sic] the functionalist credo.” In the late 20th century, English translations of the Circle’s seminal works were published by the Czech linguist Josef Vachek in several collections.

Also in 1929, the group launched a journal, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague. World War II brought an end to it. The Travaux was briefly resurrected in 1966–1971. The inaugural issue was devoted to the political science concept of center and periphery. It was resurrected yet again in 1995.

Theory publication year

The group’s work before World War II was published in the Travaux Linguistiques and its theses outlined in a collective contribution to the World’s Congress of Slavists. The Travaux were briefly resurrected in the 1960s with a special issue on the concept of center and periphery and published again by John Benjamins Publishing Company. American scholar Dell Hymes cited his 1962 paper, “The Ethnography of Speaking,” as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to American linguistic anthropology. English translations of the Circle’s seminal works were published by the Czech linguist Josef Vachek in several collections. Many individual publications by members of the Circle also present the school’s contributions to linguistics.

Main tenets or premises

Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation during the years 1926–1939.

Among its major contributions to linguistics is the consistent emphasis on the complementarity of synchronic and diachronic methods in language analysis, the establishment of phonology as an individual field (distinguished from phonetics; see Trubetzkoy 1939), and the theorization of poetic function as one of the key functions of language.

Contributions to the study of language

The most characteristic feature of the Prague school approach is its combination of structuralism with functionalism. The latter term (like “structuralism”) has been used in a variety of senses in linguistics. Here it is to be understood as implying an appreciation of the diversity of functions fulfilled by language and a theoretical recognition that the structure of languages is in large part determined by their characteristic functions. Functionalism, taken in this sense, manifests itself in many of the more particular tenets of Prague school doctrine.

One very famous functional analysis of language, which, though it did not originate in Prague, was very influential there, was that of the German psychologist Karl Bühler, who recognized three general kinds of function fulfilled by language: Darstellungsfunktion, Kundgabefunktion, and Appelfunktion. These terms may be translated, in the present context, as the cognitive, the expressive, and the conative (or instrumental) functions. The cognitive function of language refers to its employment for the transmission of factual information; by expressive function is meant the indication of the mood or attitude of the speaker (or writer); and by the conative function of language is meant its use for influencing the person one is addressing or for bringing about some practical effect. A number of scholars working in the Prague tradition suggested that these three functions correlate in many languages, at least partly, with the grammatical categories of mood and person. The cognitive function is fulfilled characteristically by 3rd-person nonmodal utterances (i.e., utterances in the indicative mood, making no use of modal verbs); the expressive function by 1st-person utterances in the subjunctive or optative mood; and the conative function by 2nd-person utterances in the imperative.

The functional distinction of the cognitive and the expressive aspects of language was also applied by Prague school linguists in their work on stylistics and literary criticism. One of their key principles was that language is being used poetically or aesthetically when the expressive aspect is predominant, and that it is typical of the expressive function of language that this should be manifest in the form of an utterance and not merely in the meanings of the component words.

Phonological contributions

The Prague school was best known for its work on phonology. Unlike the American phonologists, Trubetskoy and his followers did not take the phoneme to be the minimal unit of analysis. Instead, they defined phonemes as sets of distinctive features. For example, in English, /b/ differs from /p/ in the same way that /d/ differs from /t/ and /g/ from /k/. Just how they differ in terms of their articulation is a complex question. For simplicity, it may be said that there is just one feature, the presence of which distinguishes /b/, /d/, and /g/ from /p/, /t/, and /k/, and that this feature is voicing (vibration of the vocal cords). Similarly, the feature of labiality can be extracted from /p/ and /b/ by comparing them with /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/; the feature of nasality from /n/ and /m/ by comparing them with /t/ and /d/, on the one hand, and with /p/ and /b/, on the other. Each phoneme, then, is composed of a number of articulatory features and is distinguished by the presence or absence of at least one feature from every other phoneme in the language. The distinctive function of phonemes, which depends upon and supports the principle of the duality of structure, can be related to the cognitive function of language.This distinctive feature analysis of Prague school phonology as developed by Jakobson became part of the generally accepted framework for generative phonology.

Two other kinds of phonologically relevant function were also recognized by linguists of the Prague school: expressive and demarcative. The former term is employed here in the sense in which it was employed above (i.e., in opposition to “cognitive”); it is characteristic of stress, intonation, and other suprasegmental aspects of language that they are frequently expressive of the mood and attitude of the speaker in this sense. The term demarcative is applied to those elements or features that in particular languages serve to indicate the occurrence of the boundaries of words and phrases and, presumably, make it easier to identify such grammatical units in the stream of speech. There are, for example, many languages in which the set of phonemes that can occur at the beginning of a word differs from the set of phonemes that can occur at the end of a word. These and other devices were described by the Prague school phonologists as having demarcative function: they are boundary signals that reinforce the identity and syntagmatic unity of words and phrases.

Theory of markedness

The notion of markedness was first developed in Prague school phonology but was subsequently extended to morphology and syntax. When two phonemes are distinguished by the presence or absence of a single distinctive feature, one of them is said to be marked and the other unmarked for the feature in question. For example, /b/ is marked and /p/ unmarked with respect to voicing. Similarly, in morphology, the regular English verb can be said to be marked for past tense (by the suffixation of -ed) but to be unmarked in the present (compare “jumped” versus “jump”). It is often the case that a morphologically unmarked form has a wider range of occurrences and a less definite meaning than a morphologically marked form.

It can be argued, for example, that, whereas the past tense form in English (in simple sentences or the main clause of complex sentences) definitely refers to the past, the so-called present tense form is more neutral with respect to temporal reference: it is nonpast in the sense that it fails to mark the time as past, but it does not mark it as present. There is also a more abstract sense of markedness, which is independent of the presence or absence of an overt feature or affix.

The words “dog” and “bitch” provide examples of markedness of this kind on the level of vocabulary. Whereas the use of the word “bitch” is restricted to females of the species, “dog” is applicable to both males and females. “Bitch” is the marked and “dog” the unmarked term, and, as is commonly the case, the unmarked term can be neutral or negative according to context (compare “That dog over there is a bitch” versus “It’s not a dog; it’s a bitch”). The principle of markedness, understood in this more general or more abstract sense, came to be quite widely accepted by linguists of many different schools, and it was applied at all levels of linguistic analysis.

Later contributions

Later Prague school work remained characteristically functional in the sense in which this term was interpreted in the pre-World War II period. The most valuable contribution made by the postwar Prague school was probably the distinction between theme and rheme and the notion of “functional sentence perspective” or “communicative dynamism.” By the theme of a sentence is meant that part that refers to what is already known or given in the context (sometimes called, by other scholars, the topic or psychological subject); by the rheme, the part that conveys new information (the comment or psychological predicate).

It has been pointed out that, in languages with a free word order (such as Czech or Latin), the theme tends to precede the rheme, regardless of whether the theme or the rheme is the grammatical subject, and that this principle may still operate, in a more limited way, in languages, like English, with a relatively fixed word order (compare “That book I haven’t seen before”). But other devices may also be used to distinguish theme and rheme. The rheme may be stressed (“Jóhn saw Mary”) or made the complement of the verb “to be” in the main clause of what is now commonly called a cleft sentence (“It’s Jóhn who saw Mary”).

The general principle that guided research in “functional sentence perspective” is that the syntactic structure of a sentence is in part determined by the communicative function of its various constituents and the way in which they relate to the context of utterance. A somewhat different but related aspect of functionalism in syntax is seen in work in what is called case grammar. Case grammar is based upon a small set of syntactic functions (agentive, locative, benefactive, instrumental, and so on) that are variously expressed in different languages but that are held to determine the grammatical structure of sentences. Although case grammar does not derive directly from the work of the Prague school, it is very similar in inspiration.

Language acquisition experience 

Prague Linguists was seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others. They used the notions phoneme and morpheme, but they tried to go beyond description to explanation. The functional explanation aroused from the Malthesius’s work. He called the notion of theme and rheme as ‘functional sentence perspective’.

Many sentences are uttered in order to give the hearer some information, but we carefully tailor our statements with a view about what we want the hearer to learn, what he already knows and the context of the discourse.

The modern Chomskyan school, however, lays great stress on the need for linguistics statements to ‘explain’ rather than merely ‘describe’ and it has no objection to the postulation of unobservables; yet a Chomskian grammar will simply list the syntactic ‘transformations’ such as passive, which a given languages contains, and will give no hint.