jueves, 29 de mayo de 2014

The London School MEMORY GAME!

Here's a link to this awesome memory game that will help you remember  the main representatives of the London School and what they did. Enjoy the game! :D


Just follow the link below!  :D 
http://matchthememory.com/Language

ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS

ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS.

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language. This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.

Anthropological linguistics is concerned with:

Descriptive (or synchronic) linguistics: Describing dialects (forms of a language used by a specific speech community). This study includes phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and grammar.

Historical (or diachronic) linguistics: Describing changes in dialects and languages over time. This study includes the study of linguistic divergence and language families, comparative linguistics, etymology, and philology.

Ethnolinguistics: Analyzing the relationship between culture, thought, and language.


Sociolinguistics: Analyzing the social functions of language and the social, political, and economic relationships among and between members of speech communities.


miércoles, 28 de mayo de 2014

The London School


The London school of linguistics is involved with the study of language on the descriptive plane (synchrony), the distinguishing of structural (syntagmatic) and systemic (paradigmatic) concepts, and the social aspects of language. In the forefront is semantics. The school’s primary contribution to linguistics has been the situational theory of meaning in semantics (the dependence of the meaning of a linguistic unit on its use in a standard context by a definite person; functional variations in speech are distinguished on the basis of typical contexts) and the prosodic analysis in phonology (the consideration of the phenomena accruing to a sound: the number and nature of syllables, the character of sound sequences, morpheme boundaries, stress, and so on). The distinctive function is considered to be the primary function of a phoneme.

Main Representatives:

viernes, 11 de abril de 2014

Copenhaguen School


The prague School

A group of linguists established in Prague in 1926 who developed distinctive feature theory in phonology and communicative dynamism in language teaching. Its proponents developed methods of structuralism literary analysis during the years 1928–1939. It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. Main Representatives The Prague linguistic circle included Russian émigrés such as Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevskiy, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars Renè Wellek and Jan Mukařovský.


The instigator of the circle and its first president was the eminent Czech linguist Vilém Mathesius. Vilém Mathesius. He founded the Prague School. Independently of de Saussure, he described the principles of function-structural language description in his paper “On the potentiality of language phenomena”. Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy. Was a member of the Prague School. He belonged to a scholarly family of the Russian nobility. His father had been a professor of philosophy and rector of Moscow University. He wrote the book ‘Principles of Phonology’. Roman Osipovich Jakobson. He was born in Russia. He studied and thought in Prage. He was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He lived in USA since Second World War.


Jakobson represent one of the very few personal links between European and American traditions of linguistics. His ideas had much to do with radical change of direction that occurred in American linguistics over the last years. The most important aspect of Jakobson work is his phonological theory. Here Jakobson is a recognizably member of the Prague School -like Trubetzkoy he is interested in the analysis of the phonemes into their component features rather than in the distribution of phonemes. Contribution. The most significant contribution of this school is the methodological principle of switching, by amending a phoneme for another in a particular place in the spoken chain, producing a paradigmatic opposition, and thus, a change in direction.


 The first results of the members' cooperative efforts were presented in joint theses prepared for the First International Congress of Slavicists held in Prague in 1929. These were published in the 1st volume of the then started series Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague. The Théses outlined the direction of the work of the Circle's members. Such important concepts as the approach to the study of language as a synchronic system which is, however, dynamic, functionality of elements of language, and the importance of the social function of language were explicitly laid down as the basis for further research. The new concepts and theories, launched by The Prague Linguistic Circle became key concepts in linguistics so happened with the concept of neutralization and the theory of markedness, which were inherited by generative grammar. Prague linguists innovate the functionalist mainstream in the definition of the language: for them, language is a system of appropriate expression means to an end. In addition, language is a functional system itself: Phonic structures, grammatical and lexical language are dependent of the linguistic functions. Prague scholars provided the first systematic formulation of semiotic structuralism.

 Semiotics emerged from Prague Linguistic Circle structuralism. The Prague Linguistic Circle members were the first to claim that literary history has to be based on literary theory and the first to develop a comprehensive theory of literary history.



Without the Prague School the image of the twentieth century structuralism and linguistics is incomplete both historically and theoretically. They brought innovations and contributions not only to the development of linguistics, but also to the development of phonetics, phonology and syntax.

Language puzzle!

preview50 piecepuzzle!

lunes, 24 de marzo de 2014

The Prague School

Okay, so I know we haven't been updating this blog in a while, but work and school have been a bit of stressful; but lets talk about something else!

So, this time we're going to talk about The Prague School! to start with the subject, first we need to introduce someone REALLY important to it. Ladies and Gentlemen, we are talking about Vilém Mathesius!
a Czesh Anglicist who studied (and latter started to taught) at the Caroline University of Prague~ 

1911 was a year for important linguistic-related events. Saussure's lectures on synchronic linguistics and Boas's Handbook publication, and the first call for Mathesius of a new non-historical approach to language study took place on that year. 

Around Mathesius here came to be a circle of like-minded linguistic scholars that began to meet for regular discussion (about linguistic-related things and others) and came to be recognized as the "Prague School".  (At least until the WWII). 

The hallmark of the Prague School was that it saw language in term of function. Not that they see it as completely fulfilling a purpose, but they analysed a given language with a view to show the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language. 

Prague linguistics looked at languages as one might look at a  motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.