Prague school

The Prague school whose academic work began in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, is the third structuralist linguistic school ( next to the American taxonomic and the Copenhagen School ). Basically, there were the researches of Ferdinand de Saussure and the theories of the Russian Formalists. The language is understood by the Prague linguists as corresponding to a system of functional formal elements ( phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, texts) to create communication. Thus, the Prague school belongs to the series of functionalist linguistic theories.

The Prague school also established the phonology as a linguistic sub-discipline.

Since the 1960s, the Functional Generative Description is developed by the "new" Prague school.

With recourse to concepts of Russian linguistics, the Czech members of the Prague Linguistic Circle also created the theory of language culture as a basis for the standardization of the Czech.

Leading members of the Prague Linguistic Circle were the Russian-born Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Troubetzkoy and the Czechs Vilém Mathesius and Bohuslav Havranek.

Some of the central theorems of Prague School were taken over from the late 1920s by leading Czech literary theorists such as eg John Mukařovský. This literary theory offshoot of the Prague Linguistic Circle is also known as the Prague literary structuralism.