Prague School Syntax and Semantics

Abstract

This chapter describes features of the Prague School of Linguistics. The Prague School of Linguistics, though better known for its research into the domain of phonology, has brought many valuable insights into syntax and semantics as well, especially with its due regard to the character of language as a system of signs (with its specific relation between grammar and semantics) and to the communicative function of language. The distinction made between “sentence,” as a unit of the language system and “utterance event,” as a unit of discourse, or a verbal “communicate,” can be traced back to Karcevskij (1931, 1937), with whom “proposition” denotes a predicative system, while “phrase” refers to a function of dialogue having two sides: from the point of view of the conceptual layer, “phrase” is a communicative unit, while from that of the phonic layer, it is an international unit. The correlation of grammatical and semantic sentence patterns is not biunique; grammatical sentence patterns may exhibit both polysemy and synonymy.