“Project of the Faculty of Economics and the University of Applied Sciences Faculty of Management in Steyr Austria”

From the Prague Linguistic Circle (PLC) to the French Text Grammar
My presentation will be both historical and geographical. I intend, in the first part, to recall the important place of the PLC in western linguistics since the beginning of the 20th century. In the second part, I shall attempt to show the relationship which even today unites this Prague school and the one I represent here: “text grammar” which I will call “French”, and which burgeoned and was to a certain extent shaped in the East of France thirty years ago, in both Metz and Nancy.
In this way I hope to show that there has long been not only a Europe of the sciences without frontiers but that a “geopolicy” of the sciences, even a linguistic policy of the sciences enriches the European heritage via a network of cooperative efforts which are not only institutional, but deeply anchored in our memory and identity - collective, common, both ancient and in perpetual construction or reconstruction, due to its very dynamism and the durability of these exchanges.
1. The PLC’s fortunes
The PLC or "Prague school" (Pražský lingvistický kroužek) constituted an influential group of scholars in literature and linguistics during the first half of the 20th century. Its founder members developed work from 1928 to 1939 which had a significant and durable influence on linguistics and poetry.
The Prague Circle welcomed Russian émigrés like Roman Jakobson, whose impact on Lévi-Strauss is well-known, or Nicolaï Troubetzkoy, who is considered one of the founders of phonology. It also included, of course, Czechs such as René Wellek, who had a considerable impact on American literary criticism (see his Theory of literature in collaboration with Austin Warren).
Moreover, the Circle’s creator and first president was the Czech linguist, Vilém Mathesius (president of the PLC up to his death in 1945), whom I shall speak about at the end. Roman Jakobson was vice-president.
The group’s work before the Second World War was published in the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, (The Works of the Prague Linguistic Circle, written in French), in which the term structure appears for the first time in its linguistic sense. Their first delivery dates from 1929, for the first International Slavists Congress. This was thus – well before Lévi-Strauss and Todorov, as far as France is concerned – the first Structuralist Manifesto.
The concept of function in language is the key concept in the PLC’s work. It is, in the great diversity of this work, the only common point conferring on the Circle identity and cohesion. However, we must not limit the inventiveness of the Prague Linguistic Circle to phonology alone (even if it was " il cri de guerre del Circolo ", as says Savina Raynaud ). Thus, the term function has, in the Circle’s work, two quite different meanings, which were taken up later:

• language has a function, which means it is used for something: Jakobson’s communication diagram was later to be a famous formalization;
• a language is composed of elements which either have or don’t have a function: phonemes are used to distinguish minimal pairs, which is the foundation of phonology, while the sounds themselves are not discriminating elements, and are part of phonetics. Martinet’s is one of the French schools to be influenced by the Prague School and was to take up this distinction.

After World War Two, the Circle as such disappeared but the Prague School survived as a major component of linguistic functionalism. The academic Dell Hymes introduced Prague’s functionalism into American linguistic anthropology in his 1962 article entitled The Ethnography of Speaking. The Travaux resumed in the 1960s to tackle the concept of “centre and periphery”.
A symposium on this subject, organised in Nové Hrady by the University of Southern Bohemia (Jihočeská univerzita), has been held in March 2009. It brought together colleagues from various European geographical and epistemological backgrounds. Regarding France, two tendencies, which I would dub "Neo-Praguian", were represented: one by André Martinet’s pupils still known as functionalists and the text linguists, in whose ranks I myself stand. This current has known diverse fortunes or forms. One of them is the textual grammar or linguistics current which developed in particular in the East of France around the beginning of the 80s. This subject will form the hub of my second part.
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2. Genesis and development of a “Text Grammar”, from Prague to Metz and Nancy
It is difficult to go back to the origins of, or at least to find the exact reason for an influence which in this case takes the form of a rebirth or rediscovery. The question is nevertheless interesting for the history of ideas, epistemology and the philosophy of science. The case we shall study here is, especially in view of the occasion bringing us together, a fine example of circulation with no frontiers and above all no constraints.
I am not aware of all the reasons for this rebirth. Chance may even play a role, in the sense that curiosity and erudition are phenomena related to the "creator aspect", as Descartes said, that is not determined and definable only by context; giving us in short a lesson in freedom by desacralizing a rigid form of materialism… The Europe of sciences without frontiers thus existed well, and obviously already, before the Iron Curtain and in spite of it, as it existed despite the divergent socio-economic systems.
In 1983 two works appeared which were to dramatically change the French linguistic landscape, characterized by, on the one hand, Chomskyan or neo-Chomskyan formalist structuralism, and, on the other, by neo-Praguian functionalism, of which one can say, from the pragmatic viewpoint which I intend to represent here, that it was, as with the previous model, attached to the language system more than to productions in discourse (in texts).
Let us consider the coincidence of dates. These two works thus appeared in the same year, one in Paris, the other in Brussels, from two prestigious publishers, but the authors were teacher-researchers at respectively Nancy (Bernard Combettes) and Metz (Robert Martin).
The two works have another common characteristic, and by no means a negligible one. With their titles, which both begin with the preposition Pour (in the original), the two authors are telling us they are proposing a "committed" work, supporting a renovation. Robert Martin wrote Pour une logique du sens (For a logic of meaning), a logic he intends to be "natural", to break with the tradition of a formal or symbolic, and decontextualized logic; Bernard Combettes wrote Pour une grammaire textuelle (For a textual grammar) which aims to break with the old grammatical tradition centred on sentences, also decontextualized, as they can be seen precisely exposed and analysed in traditional grammars.
However, one may still ask what brings together these two works and their authors in the same renovatory impulse, in favour of natural language and complex, contextualized linguistic productions (linguistic productions considered in their contexts): what brings them together is a linguistic unity deriving from logic and philosophy, the proposition.
Thus both start from the proposition in the logical meaning of the term, that is as the mark, the expression of judgement, according to Descartes and the French grammarians of the 18th century, then Chomsky in his Cartesian Linguistics (1966); this logical proposition is composed "rationally" and "generally" of a subject (what we predicate about) and an attribute (what we predicate).
Before coming, and in order to do so, to their linguistics renovation project which moreover would henceforth change into sciences of language, it was necessary for our two authors, Combettes and Martin, to fill a void, arrange a passage, find a pathway. The Prague Circle was to provide it. Both Combettes and Martin said how much they owed to them: from Mathesius to Firbas, from Vachek to Danes, and again, beyond, or below, to Bühler and Troubetzkoy who met at the University of Vienna.
Thus, it is the whole genius of Mitteleuropa which is brought here, from Iena to Vienna: it’s a wonderful homage to what Savina Raynaud (op. cit.) calls L’ambiente praghese e la sua cultura, austriaca, tedesca e ceca, defining thus Prague as an area, an environment, an "ambience" more cultural than spatial, which in this case obviously goes beyond the frontiers or limits of one city or country.
It is also another example of what I called, in my work on Conceptual Realities , the "geography of invisible countries". These countries, for all they are spatially transborder, or else a-bordered (without borders) because imaginary, are none the less real and present in the collective, scientific or folk memory. They are less inhabited by than they inhabit our consciousness, diversely shared, and they haunt our discourse like so many commonplaces, background frames, and in linguistic terms, as so many pre-discourses, following the concept proposed by Marie-Anne Paveau .
But to get to the bottom of this mystery: what do we today still owe to the "Scholars of Prague", this transnational scientific community?
We owe to them that there was, starting in the 20s and 30s, in the heart of Europe, a revolution in the sciences of language, if not in the human and social sciences, or just in the sciences. Classic logic is subject to the test of reality, or the language of the everyday, in other words to the test of logical, or so illogical, modalities and vagueness; truth value gives way to language functions which go beyond the mere necessity of calculating the truth; from functions of language we move on to language in function; we move away from the formal or formalistic calculation of the conditions of truth (vericonditionality) to considering ways to express, to posit and imagine truth (veridictionality).
The notion of logical proposition (which, as has been said, is the foundation of predication as an "effigy of reason" according to Descartes and later Chomsky) finds itself thus revised. It is no longer a question of logical subject, or argument, and logical predicate, or attribute. It is now a question of psychological subject and predicate; of exchange between locutor and interlocutor, of interacting effects, and of mutual comprehension, common construction of meaning: the subject (that about which we assert) becomes the theme (what we talk about), the predicate (what we assert) the rheme (what we say about it). Judgement gives way to speech, to language in action and in situation, to discourses and texts, effective in context.
In conclusion, I will say that the particular contribution of my colleagues from Metz and Nancy is to have taken up these "psychological" bases to bring them to fruition some fifty years later; and if the question of thematic coherence and progression of texts is today a value shared in our scientific community, recognized world wide, in the long run it is certainly owed to the Prague Linguistic Circle, but in the short term to French developments of the heritage of Prague.
I am pleased to have had the opportunity to celebrate, in the heart of Mitteleuropa, a continent of sciences without frontiers and the anniversary of a Revolution, so exemplarily, called Velvet.