Prague School influence: summary

[Wolfgang Schulze]

Frederick Newmeyer wrote:

> However, there was wild disagreement among the respondents on the degree
> to which mainstream North American functionalism (and the similar German
> functionalism represented by linguists such as Haspelmath, Heine, and
> Lehmann) is indebted to Praguean work.

Let me just add that there is another Western European linguistic tradition
maintained by people who had first been trained in Indo-European linguistics
but lateron turned to "functionalism" or language typology etc. In
Indo-European linguistics the Prague School has played an important role since
the first (recorded) gathering of the group on March 13, 1925. Since then (or,
say, since 1926) the names of Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, Jakobson , Trnka,
Skalichka etc. have become part of the reading canon of Indo-Europeanists
(except for Germany in the years 1938-1945). In Germany, some departments of
General Linguistics emerged from departments of Indo-European studies, and it
takes no wonder that - contrary to what had been taught in newly founded
linguistic departments (often GLOW or Montague oriented) - the Prague School
enjoyed an unbroken tradition in these institutes. This kind of tradition
established a more or less tacit knowledge of what Prague stands for. For most
IE-ists "Prague" was much more like a matter of fact than the name of a
specific "school". Hence, there had seldom been the need to "teach" Prague:
Its phonological and syntactic claims had been (and still are) transmitted in
any lecture on say Old Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, or Gothic. The same
seems to be true for what we call the "Single Language Philologies" such as
Germanic, Romanic, or Slavic languages. In consequence, quite a number of
typologically oriented people in Western Europe have "internalized" the
assumptions and methods of the Prague School via their formation as
Indo-Europeanists. That does not imply that these researchers have an
uncritical access to Prague; rather that they operate in terms that reflect
the "functional-structural method" (By-Laws of the "Prague Linguistic Circle",
§ 1) per se.... These people did not need to rediscover Prague work or to
extract it from what has been taught in the US in terms of  "mainstream North
American functionalism" [though they participate in this mainstream, now].
Funny enough that it is just this group of people that has gained lesser or
limited interest in the US....[perhaps this is also due to the fact that some
of these people are used to publish - at least partly - in German].

"Geoffrey S. Nathan" wrote:

> One of the questions I have discussed with European friends is whether the
> word 'functionalism' has a different meaning in Europe and the US. It seems
> that European linguists generally use the word to mean the study of the
> function of units within the system (and hence the European functionalist
> theory is compatible with an autonomy hypothesis) while on this side of the
> pond the word generally means the study of how grammar is shaped by the
> functions that language has in human behavior (thus, functionalist
> phonology, as I practice it, is shaped by the physical equipment that is
> used to produce and perceive it). American functionalism, thus, is by
> definition, non-autonomous. This sometimes leads to puzzling
> non-conversations at international conferences. This may explain the
> contradictory results that Fritz has received in his survey.

It may be true that some European linguists concentrate on "system internal
(or immanent) functionalism". But that does not imply that assumption
resulting from therefrom are automatically "compatible with an autonomy
hypothesis". Some people simply are not interested in this question. What they
do can perhaps best be labeled as "Neo-Grammar in Synchrony". But many people
at least in Germany do not belong to this paradigm in its simplicity. Rather,
they refer to "functionalism" in both a "system immanent" and a "system
transcendent" sense and claim that the explanation of linguistic facts has to
respect both aspects (but with the same rigorositiy what again stems from
Prague). The syncrestistic amalgamation of external and internal motivations
for linguistic data often to be found in European linguistics does not result
from any kind of random explanatory access to these data [I hope], but from a
formulated interest in a holistic approach that encompasses all possible
motivations for language structure [to give a humble reference: I myself have
recently tried to outline such an approach (what I call the "Grammar of Scenes
and Scenarios") in Schulze 1998 ("Person, Klasse, Kongruenz", vol. 1 (in two
parts): Die Grundlagen, München: LINCOM Europa)].

[By the way, if you have a look at Eastern European linguistics (in the
tradition of the communicative-functional paradigm that itself goes back to
Prague [despite of Stalin's intervention] you can easily recognize that
"functionalism" refers to a "dependent reading"].

Wolfgang

_____________________________________________________
| Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
| Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft
| Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
| Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
| D-80539 Muenchen
| Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.)
|       +89-21802485 (office)
| Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de
| http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/
_____________________________________________________

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