Bohuslav Havránek: Contributions to his life and work (original) (raw)
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American Anthropologist, 1966
(Karcevskij); homonymy (Trnka); emphasis (Mathesius); taboo (Trost). Genetic comparison recedes into the background, etymology is inconspicuous to the vanishing point, and syntax plays second fiddle, unless its shaken status is redeemed by collateral reference to phonemics, as in Karcevskij's lengthy paper "Sur la phonologie de la phrase"-all this as expected from one's earlier exposure to Prague School preferences. Rut the rigorous exclusion of metrics and metaphorics runs counter to legitimate anticipations and seems to involve a bit of private editorial caprice. Vachek has succeeded in fitting into a book of reasonable length-though one far too costly for its less than attractive physical appearance-a wealth of materizl hitherto available, on this side of the Atlantic, only in a few research libraries, part of it, a t that, couched in languages familiar solely to a minority of potential readers; for this service we owe him gratitude. But, in delimiting the scope of the Prague School, he has interpreted his assignment in a distressingly unimaginative way. This parochial narrowness and arbitrary confinement to the original locale and its nearest affiliates-for the sake of authenticity?-have hindered him from disclosing the powerful impact of the Prague School on such versatile, mentally elastic, and influential Indo-Europeanists as Kurylowicz, Benveniste, and Martinet, whose writings one is shocked to see excluded. The increasingly important connection with Romance scholarship (T. Navarro, A. Alonso, E. Alarcos Llorach, D. Catalkn on the side of Spain; G. Contini, C. Segre, V. Belardi, on the Italian flank; G. Gougenheim in France; H. Lausberg and H. Weinrich in Germany; B. Malmberg in Sweden, to mention just a few names, plus their numerous disciples in two hemispheres) has been unwarrantedly swept under the rug; and the stature of the School has been commensurately diminished. What we need now without further delay, and preferably from an impartial, uncommitted anthologist, is a companion reader embodying the currently relevant worldwide repercussions of the practically defunct Prague School.
International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, 2018
In the rise and development of modern phonology, the Prague School undoubtedly played the vital role. Although Saussure suggested that "syntagmatic" is one of the two most important features of linguistic signs, Jakobson yet discovered on the phonological level the "paradigmatic" linguistic unitdistinctive feature, which served as an essential concept in late 20 th century phonology. Jakobson's theory of distinctive feature is typically made known via the books he published in the United States after WWII. However, his idea of distinctive feature had already been initiated in the 1930s during the classic period of the Prague School. The term "distinctive feature" was also used directly. The term and the idea were actively responded by other members of the circle like Trubetzkoy and Vachek and came to turn mature. Published on different occasions, the texts that witnessed this historical process were written in different languages. Only when these multilingual texts are studied comprehensively can one depict a full trail of the early history of distinctive feature, the paradigmatic phonological unit. Based on the works written by Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Vachek and other circle members during 1931 to 1939 in English, French, German and Czech, this essay intends to reveal how Prague School contributed to the idea of paradigmatic phonological unit, and how it improved the limitation of Saussure's view of linguistic symbol.
"Balcania et Slavia. Studi linguistici | Studies in Linguistics" Vol. 3 | Issue 1 | June 2023
Balcania et Slavia. Studi linguistici | Studies in Linguistics, 2023
Balcania et Slavia. Studi linguistici | Studies in linguistics is a newly founded international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the modern Slavic and Balkan languages from the perspective of theoretical, areal-typological, and contrastive linguistics. The Journal intends to promote high-quality scholarly work on all topics relevant to the theoretical description and analysis of Slavic and Balkan languages in synchrony as well as in diachrony. The main areas of interest include, but are not limited to, their structural make-up, contact in space and time, variation and microvariation in the Balkan-Slavic area, first and second language acquisition in bilingual and multilingual environments. Although it is based at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the Journal aims at providing an international academic platform where scholars and researchers working within both the traditional and the more recently developed experimental frameworks can share novel ideas and advance theoretical proposals in the field of Slavic and Balkan linguistics.
The Prague school, teleology and language as a dynamic system
Acta Structuralica, 2018
The present article deals with the concept of the goal-oriented linguistic model developed by the Prague Linguistic Circle and presented in the Prague Theses (1929) as linguistic “purposefulness”. This approach is often classified as a teleological viewpoint on language phenomena. Teleology being incompatible with the present-day scientific framework (both in the humanities and the natural sciences), this part of the Prague linguistic heritage has only rarely been dealt with in depth and has been almost forgotten in recent years. P. Sériot speaks of “allusions likely to be negligently skipped over today because they no longer make sense to the contemporary reader” (Sériot, 2014, 20). In this paper, I attempt to introduce the notion of “purposefulness” in a different light, avoiding teleological thinking and reinterpreting “purposefulness” in a more plausible way for a contemporary reader. In fact, the choice of the term “purposefulness” might have originated due to a lack of suitable terminology and might be reconstructed in connection with contemporary dynamic approaches in linguistics.