Copenhagen school and the main ideas of scholars
Lecture № 3
Developing of ideas and schools in modern linguistics.
The main method of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century was the historical comparative method. It was for the scientific study of languages, it had definite shortcomings and limitations.
The historical comparative method gave no exact definition of the object of linguistics as an independent science. As Louis Hjelmslev pointed out, "The linguistics of the past-even of the recent past—has concerned itself with the physical and physiological, psychological and logical, sociological and historical precipitations of languages, not of the language itself."
The study of numerous languages of the world was neglected.
ft was mainly the historical changes of phonological and morphological units that were studied. Syntax hardly existed.
As a reaction to the atomistic approach to language a new theory appeared.
The first linguists to speak of language as a system or a structure of smaller systems were de Courtenay, Fortunatov and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de-Saussure.
The work that came to be most widely known is de-Saussure's. Course in General L.inguistics, posthumously compiled from his pupils' lecture-notes between 1906 and 1911.
De-Saussure’s main ideas are as follows:
1. Language is understood as a system of signals, interconnected and interdependent. It is this network of interdependent elements that form the object of linguistics as an independent science.
2. Language as a system of signals may be compared to other
systems of signals, such as writing, alphabets for the deaf-and-dumb, military signals, symbolic rites, forms of courtesy, etc. Thus, language may be considered as being the object of a more general science— semeiology—a science of the future which would study different systems of signals used in human societies.
3. Language has two aspects: the system of language and the manifestation of this system in social intercourse—speech. The system of language is a body of linguistic units—sounds, affixes, words, grammar rules and rules of lexical series.The system of language enables us to speak and to be understood since it is known to all the members of a speech community. Speech is based on the system of language, and it gives the linguist the possibility of studying the system.
De-Saussure gave the following diagram to illustrate his theory of the associative series of the system of language
Educate
| education | instruct | relate | debate |
| educates | teach | locate | prelate |
| etc. | enlighten | translate | etc. |
| etc. | etc. |
4. The linguistic sign is bilateral.. It has both form and meaning. We understand the meaning of the linguistic sign as reflecting the elements (objects, events, situations) of the outside world.
5. The linguistic sign is 'absolutely arbitrary1 and 'relatively motivated'. This means that if we take a word 'absolutely' disregarding its
connections to other words in the system, we shall find nothing obligatory in the relation of its phonological form to the object it denotes. This fact becomes evident when we compare the names of the same objects in different languages, e.g.:
| English: | ox | hand | winter |
| French: | boeuf | main | hiver |
| Russian: | 6bIK | рука | зима |
The 'relative motivation' means that the linguistic sign connections with other linguistic signs of the system both in form and meaning These connections are different in different languages and show the difference of' the segmentation of the picture of the world'.
6. Language is to be studied as a system in the 'synchronic plane', at a given moment of its existence, in the plane of simultaneous coexistence of elements. We understand the synchronic plane as a given moment of the historical development of the language studied.
7. The system of language is to be studied on the basis of the oppositions of rare units. The linguistic elements can be found by means of segmenting the flow of speech and comparing the isolated segments, e.g. in 'the strength of the wind' and in 'to collect one's strength' we recognize one and the same unit 'strength' in accord with its meaning and form; but in 'on the strength of this decision' the meaning is not the same and we recognize a different linguistic uni
There were three main linguistic schools that developed these new notions: the Prague School that created Functional linguistics, the Copenhagen School which created Glossematics, and the American School that created Descriptive linguistics.
The Prague school
The Prague School was founded in 1929. The main contribution of there linguistics to modern linguistics is the technique for determining the units of the phonological structure of languages. The basic method is the use of oppositions of speech-sounds that change the meaning of the words. The basic definitions are given by Trubetzkoy:
Point 1: If in a language two sounds occur in the same position and can besubstituted for each other without changing the meaning of the word, such sounds are optional variants of one and the same phoneme.
Point 2: If two sounds occur in the same position and cannot be substituted for each other without changing the meaning of the word, these two sounds are phonetic realizations of two different phonemes.
Point 3: If two similar sounds never occur in the same position, they are positional variants of the same phoneme.
Trubetzkoy developed an elaborate set of contrast criteria for the identification and classification of phonological oppositions. The most widely known is the binary opposition in which one member of the contrastive pair is characterized by the presence of a certain feature which is lacking in the other member. The element possessing the feature in question is called the 'marked' (strong) member of the opposition, the other is called the 'unmarked' (weak) member of the opposition. A phoneme is distinguished from all the other phonemes by a set of distinctive features, 'e-8- [p] is distinguished from [b] as a voiceless sound, from [t] as a
bilabial, from [m] as having no nasalisation, etc. Thus any phoneme is defined as a set or 'bundle' of differential (distinctive) features.
He has stressed the fact that his technique of analysis may be used in other domains of linguistics. The method of oppositions has been successfully extended to grammar and semantics.
The principle of binary oppositions is suitable for describing morphological categories. As I. B.Khlebnikova points out, "binary relations penetrate practically every plane of language- phonological, morphological, and syntactic, but are especially evident on the morphological level, which reflects the structural organization of a particular language".
The principle of privatize oppositions has been used by Roman Jakobson for describing the morphological categories. Jakobson proposed the following three distinctive features: A—direction, B— objectiveness, C—periphery.
The principle of privative oppositions can be easily applied to English morphology. The most general case is that system of tense-forms of the English verb. The tense-forms of the English verb are divided into two halves: that ofthe tense-forms of the present plane, and that of the tenses of the past plane. The former comprises the Present, Present Perfect, Present Continuous, Present Perfect Continuous, and the Future tense-forms; the latter includes Past, Past Perfect, Past Continuous, Past Perfect Continuous and the Future-in-the-Past. The second half is characterized by specific formal features—either the suffix-ed (or its equivalents) appear, or a phonetic modification of the root. The past is thus a marked member of the opposition 'present—past' as against the present sub-system, which is the unmarked member.
It was pointed out that "the opposition between perfect and nonperfect forms is shown to be that between a marked and an unmarked item, the perfect forms being marked both in meaning (denoting precedence) and in morphological characteristics ('have + second participle'), and the nonperfect forms—unmarked both in meaning and in morphological
characteristics.
The obvious opposition within the category of voice, is that between active and passive. A few pairs of parallel forms involving different categories of aspect, tense, correlation, and mood illustrate the opposition of active/passive.
"From the point of view of form, the passive voice is the marked member of the opposition: its characteristic is the pattern 'be + second participle', whereas the active voice is unmarked: its characteristic is the absence of that pattern."
The principle of privative oppositions has been recently used to represent the traditional sentence-parts of the basic two-member sentence type. The parts of such a sentence type are defined by their position in the structure of the sentence: the subject to the left of the verb-predicate, the object to the right of the verb, the adverbial modifier to the right of the object; the attribute, that may appear as an optional sentence-part, occupies the position in contact to the noun. The syntactic relations of the sentence parts are characterized by three distinctive features: A— subordination, B—predicativenessand C— objectiveness—feature connected, but not without reservation, with the possibility of changing the active to the passive construction. Thus we have:
Copenhagen school and the main ideas of scholars
The Copenhagen School was founded in 1933. In 1939 the Prague
and the Copenhagen Schools founded the magazine Acta Linguistica that had been for several years the international magazine of Structural
Linguistics. In the early thirties the conception of the Copenhagen School
was given the name of the Copenhagen School of "Glossematics"
In 1943 Hjelmslev published his main work Principles of Linguistics, which was translated into English and appeared in Baltimore in 1953.
Glossematics thought was to give a more exact definition of the object of linguistics. The two sides of the linguistic sign recognised by de- Saussure are considered by Hjelmslev to have both form and substance.
The object of the linguistic science is limited to the two inner form in the plane of content and the form in the plane of expression, i.e., linguistics studies nothing but form. The form in the plane of content is the segmentation of the picture of the world, which is different in different languages, e.g.
Similar differences may be easily found in tense and case-systems,
in the expression of genders in different languages, etc. The two inner layers are connected by the 'law of commutation,' which means that differences in the plane of expression signal differences in the plane of content. There is no simple one-to-one correspondence of the two planes. The units of the planes may be decomposed into smaller components which reveal the correspondences of the two planes.