Phonological contributions

The Prague school was best known for its work on phonology. Unlike the American phonologists, Trubetskoy and his followers did not take the phoneme to be the minimal unit of analysis. Instead, they defined phonemes as sets of distinctive features. For example, in English, /b/ differs from /p/ in the same way that /d/ differs from /t/ and /g/ from /k/. Just how they differ in terms of their articulation is a complex question. For simplicity, it may be said that there is just one feature, the presence of which distinguishes /b/, /d/, and /g/ from /p/, /t/, and /k/, and that this feature is voicing (vibration of the vocal cords). Similarly, the feature of labiality can be extracted from /p/ and /b/ by comparing them with /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/; the feature of nasality from /n/ and /m/ by comparing them with /t/ and /d/, on the one hand, and with /p/ and /b/, on the other. Each phoneme, then, is composed of a number of articulatory features and is distinguished by the presence or absence of at least one feature from every other phoneme in the language. The distinctive function of phonemes, which depends upon and supports the principle of the duality of structure, can be related to the cognitive function of language. This distinctive feature analysis of Prague school phonology as developed by Jakobson became part of the generally accepted framework for generative phonology (see above).

Two other kinds of phonologically relevant function were also recognized by linguists of the Prague school: expressive and demarcative. The former term is employed here in the sense in which it was employed above (i.e., in opposition to “cognitive”); it is characteristic of stress, intonation, and other suprasegmental aspects of language that they are frequently expressive of the mood and attitude of the speaker in this sense. The term demarcative is applied to those elements or features that in particular languages serve to indicate the occurrence of the boundaries of words and phrases and, presumably, make it easier to identify such grammatical units in the stream of speech. There are, for example, many languages in which the set of phonemes that can occur at the beginning of a word differs from the set of phonemes that can occur at the end of a word. These and other devices were described by the Prague school phonologists as having demarcative function: they are boundary signals that reinforce the identity and syntagmatic unity of words and phrases.

Theory of markedness

The notion of markedness was first developed in Prague school phonology but was subsequently extended to morphology and syntax. When two phonemes are distinguished by the presence or absence of a single distinctive feature, one of them is said to be marked and the other unmarked for the feature in question. For example, /b/ is marked and /p/ unmarked with respect to voicing. Similarly, in morphology, the regular English verb can be said to be marked for past tense (by the suffixation of -ed) but to be unmarked in the present (compare “jumped” versus “jump”). It is often the case that a morphologically unmarked form has a wider range of occurrences and a less definite meaning than a morphologically marked form. It can be argued, for example, that, whereas the past tense form in English (in simple sentences or the main clause of complex sentences) definitely refers to the past, the so-called present tense form is more neutral with respect to temporal reference: it is nonpast in the sense that it fails to mark the time as past, but it does not mark it as present. There is also a more abstract sense of markedness, which is independent of the presence or absence of an overt feature or affix. The words “dog” and “bitch” provide examples of markedness of this kind on the level of vocabulary. Whereas the use of the word “bitch” is restricted to females of the species, “dog” is applicable to both males and females. “Bitch” is the marked and “dog” the unmarked term, and, as is commonly the case, the unmarked term can be neutral or negative according to context (compare “That dog over there is a bitch” versus “It’s not a dog; it’s a bitch”). The principle of markedness, understood in this more general or more abstract sense, came to be quite widely accepted by linguists of many different schools, and it was applied at all levels of linguistic analysis.