Prague School

The Prague School:

Prague linguists tried to outline the notions of functional style, technical language, the language of science, literary language, poetic language, spoken language, etc…..

In their study they mentioned Intellectualization or rationalization, automation, and foregrounding as some main differentiative means of expression.

Intellectualization: it culminates in the scientific theoretical discourse, where the writer tries to approximate his expression as much as possible to the objective thinking. And it characterizes the lexical plan of the linguistic act by the introduction of new words, the use of lexical items expressing existence, possibility, necessity, and relation of causality… Etc

Foregrounding, as defined by Mukarovsky, means the methods that a writer of poetry or prose uses to make certain aspects of texture in a given literary work more prominent than in ordinary language usages. We use the item in a foreground to attract the reader's attention & to produce a certain effect on him.

Automation, is the opposite of foregrounding, the more an utterance is automized the less consciously executed it is, the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious it becomes.  "Objectively speaking automation schematizes an event: Foregrounding means the violation of the scheme"

          The Function of poetic language consists in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance and it is the standard language that serves as the background, the norm or the automized cannon against which the poetic realization of language is judged and conceived.