Lecture 6
Functional School in Linguistics
Prague School of Linguistics
Actual Division of the Sentence
J. Firbas and His Theory of Functional Sentence Perspective
Functionalism - in linguistics, the approach to language study that is concerned with the functions performed by language, primarily in terms of cognition (relating information), expression (indicating mood), and conation (exerting influence). Especially associated with the Prague school of linguists prominent since the 1930s, the approach centres on how elements in various languages accomplish these functions, both grammatically and phonologically. Some linguists have applied the findings to work on stylistics and literary criticism.
The Prague Linguistic Circle or “Prague school” (Czech: Pražský lingvistický kroužek, Russian: Пражский лингвистический кружок Pražskij lingvističeskij kružek, French: Cercle linguistique de Prague) was an influential group of literary critics and linguists in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis during the years 1928–1939. It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. After World War II, the circle was disbanded but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian — later Hallidean — linguistics).
The Prague linguistic circle included Russian émigrés such as Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevskiy, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský. The instigator of the circle and its first president was the eminent Czech linguist Vilém Mathesius (President of PLC until his death in 1945), who was also a Czech literary historian, a scholar of English and Czech literature. In 1912 he became the first professor of the English language and literature at the Charles University. In 1926 V. Mathesius co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle. He engaged in grammar, phonology and stylistics of the English and Czech languages. The linguist was further interested in general linguistics, language culture and general cultural issues. His works about word order and syntax can be labeled as pioneer projects. The Prague Linguistic Circle was one of the most influential schools of linguistic thought in pre-war linguistics. Through its former members like Roman Jakobson or René Wellek, it influenced modern American linguistics as well as many other linguists in the world.
Actual Division of the Sentence
Vilém Mathesius was the first to describe the informative value of different parts of the sentence in the actual process of communication, making the informative perspective of an utterance and showing which component of the denoted situation is informationally more important from the point of view of the speaker. By analogy with the grammatical, or nominative division of the sentence the idea of the so-called “actual division” of the sentence was put forward. This linguistic theory is known as the functional analysis of the sentence, the communicative analysis, the actual division analysis, or the informative perspective analysis. In his papers V. Mathesius introduced the idea that the formal analysis of a sentence (subject and predicate – a static phenomenon) should be distinguished from the functional analysis of a sentence (‘what is being talked about’ and ‘what is being said about it’ – which is a dynamic phenomenon, changing in the very act of communication).
The main components of the actual division of a sentence are the theme and the rheme. The theme (originally called “the basis” by V. Mathesius) is the starting point of communication, a thing or a phenomenon about which something is reported in the sentence; it usually contains some old, “already known” information. The rheme (originally called “the nucleus” by V. Mathesius) is the basic informative part of the sentence, its contextually relevant communicative center, the “peak” of communication, or the information reported about the theme; it usually contains some new information.
The theme of the actual division of the sentence may or may not coincide with the subject of the sentence. The rheme of the actual division, in its turn, may or may not coincide with the predicate of the sentence — either with the whole predicate group or its part, such as the predicative, the object, the adverbial.
In some sentences, the rheme may be expressed by the subject and it may precede the theme, which is expressed by the predicate, e.g.: Who is late today? – Charlie (rheme) is late (theme). This type of actual division is called “inverted”, “reverse”, “specialized”, or “marked”. The actual division of the sentence finds its full expression only in a concrete context of speech (therefore it is sometimes referred to as the “contextual” division of the sentence).
The close connection of the actual division of the sentence with the context, which makes it possible to divide the informative parts of the communication into those “already known” by the listener and those “not yet known”, does not mean that the actual division is a purely semantic factor. There are special formal lingual means of expressing the distinction between the meaningful center of the utterance, the rheme, and the starting point of its content, the theme. They are as follows: word order patterns, constructions with introducers, syntactic patterns of contrastive complexes, constructions with articles and other determiners, constructions with intensifying particles, and intonation contours.
The connection between word order and actual division has been described above: direct actual division usually means that the theme coincides with the subject in the syntactic structure of the sentence, while the rheme coincides with the predicate. Inverted word order can indicate inverted actual division, though the correlation is not obligatory, e. g.: There was a box.