Prague School

The Prague School was a group of linguists who developed structural analysis around the functions of language, especially the organization of sound systems.

Structural linguistics: An approach that studies language as a system of interrelated elements. The Prague School adapted structural analysis to explain how linguistic elements function within a system.
Distinctive feature: A phonological property used to distinguish one sound unit from another. Distinctive features made phoneme contrasts analyzable as bundles of relevant properties.
Vilém Mathesius: A Czech linguist who founded the Prague Linguistic Circle and developed functional approaches to language. Mathesius organized the circle and shaped its functional account of sentence structure.
Saussurean linguistics: Linguistic thought influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure's account of language as a structured system of signs. The Prague School drew on Saussure while emphasizing function and phonological relations.
Generative phonology: A framework that represents sound patterns through underlying forms and ordered phonological rules. Later phonological theories inherited questions about distinctive features and sound-system organization.
Phonology: The study of sound systems and the ways speech sounds distinguish meaning in languages. Phonology became the school's most influential domain of structural analysis.
Minimal pair: Two words differing in one sound at the same position and having different meanings. Minimal pairs provide evidence that a sound difference functions phonologically.
Nikolai Trubetzkoy: A linguist whose work established a systematic theory of phonological oppositions and sound systems. His phonological theory became a defining achievement of the Prague School.
Theses of the Prague Linguistic Circle: A 1929 programmatic statement outlining the Prague Circle's approach to language and linguistic analysis. The theses made the circle's structural and functional commitments explicit.
Jakobson–Fant–Halle model: A distinctive-feature framework for describing speech sounds developed by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. It carried Prague feature analysis into a widely used model of speech sound contrasts.

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