Functional linguistics developments

Abstract

With regard to orientation and examining the functional values of linguistic elements the Prague School of Linguistics is known as the School of Functional Linguistics. Functional linguists derived their advanced theoretical postulates from the famous Kazan school that was founded by two eminent Polish citizens, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and his disciple Nikolaj Kruszewski. The representatives of this School defined the differences between evolutionary character of linguistic facts and their identification in a certain time section. The ideas of this linguistic circle spread to the USA, and even further. They claimed that language should be studied universally, first synchronically and then diachronically. They stood for the study of language from all aspects: scientific standard and journalese language. Their special attention was paid to the forms of spoken and written language. Functional linguists considered language to be a system of functionally connected items. A strong influence of Ferdinand de Saussure is reflected here as well as the distribution to phonetic and phonological analysis of sounds where phonemes are broken down to distinctive features. They believe that for correct understanding of a language system it is necessary to explain the history of a language. This view is against Saussure’s commitment to synchronic description. Prague linguists considered linguistic phenomena coherently, they discovered many problems of language seen as a means of communication among people. From the middle of XX century linguists started to develop the ideas of the Prague Linguistics School paying great attention to syntax, semantics and stylistics of English and Slavic languages. The Prague School deserves credits for formulating the theory of functional sentence perspective that analyses a sentence as a unity of functionally contrastive constituents. For all this the Prague School is a leading linguistics school in the world.