The Prague school, teleology and language as a dynamic system

Ľudmila Lacková

pp. 105-121

in: Simone Aurora (ed), Acta Structuralica 3, 2018.

Abstract

The present article deals with the concept of “purposefulness” in the goal-oriented linguistic model developed by the Prague Linguistic Circle and presented in the Thèses (1929). This approach is often classified as a teleological viewpoint on language. Teleology being incompatible with the present-day scientific framework (both in the humanities and the natural sciences), this part of the Prague linguistic heritage has only rarely been dealt with in depth and has been almost forgotten in recent years. Patrick Sériot speaks of “allusions likely to be negligently skipped over today because they no longer make sense to the contemporary reader” (Sériot, 2014, 20). Here, I present the notion of “purposefulness” in a different light, avoiding teleological thinking and reinterpreting “purposefulness” in a more plausible way for a contemporary reader. The choice of the term “purposefulness” itself might have originated due to a lack of suitable terminology and might be reconstructed in connection with contemporary dynamic approaches in linguistics.

Cited authors

Jakobson Roman

Mathesius Vilém