Functional Linguistics: the Prague School

The Prague School practised a special style of synchronic linguistcs, and although most of the scholars whom one thinks of as members of the school worked in Prague or at least in Czechoslovakia, the term is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consiciously adhered to the Prague style. 


Prague linguists on the other hand, 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. 

As long as their were describing the structure of a language, the practice of the Prague School wsa not very diffrent from that of their contemporaries-they used the notion "phoneme"and "morpheme", for instance; but they tried to go beyond description to explanation, saying not just what languages were like but what they were the way they were. American linguists restricted themselves (and still restrict themselves) to description.