Functions of Language in Prague School and Their Development

One of the significant Jakobson’s additions to linguistics was his model of the functions of language, which was based on the earlier model by Bühler. The later development of the functions of language in relation with the language itself was done by Halliday, who was partly influenced by the Prague School. Halliday proposed three metafunctions, which are broad and include other functions. Jakobson, instead, concentrated on language and its constituents. However, the link between Jakobson’s functions and Halliday’s metafunctions can be made. For instance, Halliday’s ideational metafunction can be associated with Jakobson’s referential function; interactional metafunction can be associated with the phatic, conative and emotive functions in Jakobson’s model, while textual metafunction can be associated with poetic function. Moreover, Halliday’s metafunctions is not the only development of the language functions performed by him. It was found that his ‘functions of beginning language’ (Nelson, 1998), that are related to children’s acquisition of language, are closely related with Jakobson’s functions of language. Due to the limitations of the present essay, they were not covered. However, it can be added that Halliday’s functions of beginning language, according to Nelson (1998), are divided in pragmatic and mathetic (related to ‘knowing or learning’ (ibid)) functions, where each of the functions undergoes a more detailed division. At an early stage of the child’s development ‘each utterance encodes only one function’, (ibid), that is, one of the subfunctions of pragmatic and mathetic function, while in a mature language the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions become employed. Besides, Nelson (1999) suggests, that pragmatic function can be related with the interpersonal metafunction, while the mathetic function can be related with the ideation function. All in all, the functions of language of the Prague School have been developed and various interpretations and applications were suggested.…