Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian-American linguist and literary theorist.
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology. He was also associated with the Russian Eurasianists.
In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structure. It is generally agreed that clauses are divided into topic vs. comment, but in certain cases the boundary between them depends on which specific grammatical theory is being used to analyze the sentence.
Vilém Mathesius was a Czech linguist, literary historian and co-founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He is considered one of the founders of structural functionalism in linguistics.
Louis Trolle Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family, Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris. In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structuralist theory of language which he called glossematics, which further developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism. It is interested in describing the formal and semantic characteristics of language in separation from sociology, psychology or neurobiology, and has a high degree of logical rigour. Hjelmslev regarded linguistics – or glossematics – as a formal science. He was the inventor of formal linguistics. Hjelmslev's theory became widely influential in structural and functional grammar, and in semiotics.
In linguistics, glossematics is a structuralist theory proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Hans Jørgen Uldall. It defines the glosseme as the most basic unit of language.
The Moscow linguistic circle was a group of social scientists in semiotics, literary theory, and linguistics active in Moscow from 1915 to ca. 1924. Its members included Filipp Fortunatov, Roman Jakobson, Grigoriy Vinokur, Boris Tomashevsky, and Petr Bogatyrev. The group was a counterpart to the St. Petersburg linguistic group OPOJAZ; between them, these two groups were responsible for the development of Russian formalist literary semiotics and linguistics.
Jan Mukařovský was a Czech literary, linguistic, and aesthetic theorist.
Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, which define units syntactically and lexically, respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena, the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data, the priority of linguistic form over meaning, the marginalization of written language, and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social, behavioral, or cognitive phenomena.
The Faculty of Arts, Charles University, is one of the original four faculties of Charles University in Prague. When founded, it was named the Faculty of the Liberal Arts or the Artistic Faculty. The faculty provides lectures in the widest range of fields of the humanities in the Czech Republic, and is the only university faculty in Europe which provides studies in all the official languages of the European Union. The faculty has around 1,000 members of staff, over 9,000 students, and a flexible system of more than 700 possible double-subject degree combinations.
Ladislav Matějka was a Czech scholar of semiotics and linguistic theory, who translated and published many contributions to Prague linguistic circle theory. He received his doctorate in Charles University in Prague in 1948 and then emigrated to the U.S and earned a second doctorate from Harvard University. From 1956 until 1989 he taught at University of Michigan in the Slavic Department. In 1962, he founded Michigan Slavic Publications, a series that has published more than 100 volumes by authors such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy.
Martin Anton Maurus Marty was a Swiss-born Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest. He specialized in philosophy of language, philosophy of psychology, and ontology.
Bohuslav Havránek was a Czech philologist, Bohemist, Slavist, literary historian and professor who was a prominent member of the Prague Linguistic Circle.
In linguistics, functional sentence perspective (FSP) is a theory describing the information structure of the sentence and language communication in general. It has been developed in the tradition of the Prague School of Functional and Structural Linguistics together with its sister theory, Topic-Focus Articulation.
Libuše Dušková is a Czech linguist specializing in the fields of contrastive analysis of English grammar and functional syntax, member of the Prague Linguistic Circle and key representative of the Prague School of Linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of English Linguistics at Charles University. Her research spans a broad spectrum of topics in English linguistics, namely the verb phrase, the noun phrase, simple and complex sentences, the grammar-text interface, and aspects of the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective viewed through the prism of Jan Firbas' approach.
Portal 