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Important aspects of Linguistic Theory -word scramble game

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Functions of Languange -Croosword puzzle game

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European linguistics in the 20th century

European linguistics in the 20th century

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The Prague school important personalities

Vilém Mathesius (1882-1945)	Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)	André Martinet (1908-1999)	Nicolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (1890-1938)
V.M. was one of the most remarkable and most influential personalities of the Prague school. Mathesius was one of the pioneers of the synchronic approach to facts of language, and this can be already found in his 1911 treatise,, On the   potentiality of the phenomena of Language“. The first important aspect of his work was that concerning the synchronic, non-historical approach. Secondly , ever more important about his work was the term potentiality, which was conceiverd by Mathesius as synchronous oscillation of speech in the particular language community. The oscillation is a precondition for the development of the language itself. In his view there are some tendecies in the language itself, which, though not being so constant as physical laws, are obvious and can be statistically represented.The emphasis on statistical evaluation was another contribution of Mathesius at the outset of the century. Another important point in his work was that he was convinced about the procedure from statics to dynamics to be to most reliable in linguistics.	Roman Jakobson   (1896-1982) was one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century. He was born in Russia and was a member of the Russian Formalist school as early as 1915. In 1943 he became one of the founding members of the Linguistic Circle of New York and acted as its vice president until 1949. He taught at numerous institutions from 1943 on, including Harvard University and MIT. Through his   teaching in the United States, Jakobson helped to bridge the gap between European and American linguistics. He had a profound influence on general linguistics (especially on Noam Chomsky's and Morris Halle's work) and on Slavic studies, but also on semiotics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, ethnology, mythology, communication theory and literary studies. His famous model of the functions of language is part of the intellectual heritage of semiotics.	André Martinet was born in 1908. He had occupations including author and academic. He died in Châtenay-Malabry in July 1999 aged 91 years and 3 months old. French linguist and author who was noted for his pioneering work on diachronic phonology, or sound change. His work was expounded in his 1955 book. In 1964 he was the author of "Elements of General Linguistics." From 1947, he served as the head of the linguistics department of Columbia University, but returned to the University of Paris in 1955 Following World War II he moved to New York, where he was to remain until 1955. During his time in New York Martinet directed the International Auxiliary Language Association and taught at Columbia University, where he served as chair of the department   from 1947 to 1955. Also, during this time, he became editor of Word, a linguistics journal. In 1955 he returned to his position at École Pratique des Hautes Études.	Prince Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy(April 15, 1890 – June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. Having graduated from Moscow University (1913), Trubetskoy delivered lectures there until the revolution in 1917. He left Moscow, moving several times before finally taking the chair of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna (1922–1938). On settling in Vienna, he became a geographically distant yet significant member of the Prague Linguistic School. Trubetzkoy's chief contributions to linguistics lie in the domain of phonology, particularly in analyses of the phonological systems of individual languages and in search for general and universal phonological laws. His magnum opus, Grundzüge der Phonologie(Principles of Phonology), issued posthumously, was translated into virtually all main European and Asian languages. In this book   he famously defined the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from phonetics.

The Prague School

The Prague School

The Prague Linguistic Circle or Prague school was an influential group of literary critics and linguists who came together in Prague with the common desire to create a new approach to linguistics. The most well-known period of the Circle is between 1926, its official launch, and the beginning of World War II, the time when Prague offered hope of freedom and democracy for artists and scholars in Central Europe. Their spirit of collective activity, vision of a synthesis of knowledge, and emphasis on a socially defined commitment to scholarship defined and motivated the Prague Circle.

Along with its first president, Vilém Mathesius, they included Russian émigrés such as Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevsky, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský. Their work constituted a radical departure from the classical structural position of Ferdinand de Saussure. They suggested that their methods of studying the function of speech sounds could be applied both synchronically, to a language as it exists, and diachronically, to a language as it changes. After the war, the Circle no longer functioned as a meeting of linguists, but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English linguists following the work of J. R. Firth and later Michael Halliday). It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics.

Langue and Parole

The distinction between the French words, langue (language or tongue) and  parole (speech), enters the vocabulary of theoretical linguistics with Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was published posthumously in 1915 after having been collocated from student notes.  La langue denotes the abstract systematic principles of a language, without which no meaningful utterance (parole) would be possible.  The Course manifests a shift from the search for origins and ideals, typical of nineteenth century science, to the establishment of systems.  The modern notion of system is reflected in the title of the course: General Linguistics.  Saussure in this way indicates that the course will be about language in general: not this or that particular language (Chinese or French) and not this or that aspect (phonetics or semantics).  A general linguistics would be impossible by empirical means because there exist innumerable objects that can be considered linguistic.  Instead Saussure’s methodology allows him to establish a coherent object for linguistics in the distinction between langue and parole.