influence of Prague School

[Frederick Newmeyer]

Much has been written about the influence of the pre- World War II Prague
School on generative phonology. I am interested in the extent to which
Prague School conceptions have influenced North American and Western
European SYNTAX, both generative and nongenerative. For example, the use
by generativists of distinctive features on morphological and syntactic
elements presumably derives from Prague. Likewise, one would assume that
Praguean work on functional sentence perspective has influenced current
functional linguistics. Has anything been written about 'direct lines of
transmission' between pre-war Praguean linguistics and the development of
modern formal and functional linguistics? Do such direct lines of
transmission exist?

I'll summarize.

Fritz Newmeyer
fjn at u.washington.edu