Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 78. kötet (1976)

Tanulmányok - Vachek, Josef: Gyula Laziczius and Early Prague Phonology 480

GYULA LAZICZITJS AND EARLY PRAGUE PHONOLOGY 483 apt to function as an emotive signal, provided that the given language community accepts it as such, i.e. conventionalizes it for this purpose. As an example of such conventionalized grammatical deviation may be mentioned the Mod. English feminine pronominal reference to nouns denoting inanimate beings ('things') to which otherwise only a reference by the neutral pronoun is common (see. e.g., a driver's reference to his car, a a pilot's reference to his plane, etc.14

). The emotionally motivated variants of the ModE word-order in the sentence are too well known to need any detailed commentary (and the same is even more true of lexical varieties grouping themselves into what is rather inadequately called »synonymic groups' used to denote indentical extra-lingual facts; in reality, such varieties are stylistically differentiated, at least some of them serving again as signals of emotion). One might almost say that there exists a kind of complementary distribution between the 'purely communicative' and the emotional means of language inasmuch as items of each of the two categories of language means can only be used in the functional situations duly pertinent to them. (Except, of course, the instances of ironical usage, which constitute a very special case, signalled also by some secondary, paralinguistic means, such as gestures, mimic accompaniment of utterances, etc.) Though not expressly stated, this kind of complementary distribution was, in n u с e at least, foreshadowed in Laziczius's conception which included his 'emphatica' within the hierarchy of basic phonic phenomena seen from the functionalist viewpoint. The acuity of Laziczius's vision is best revealed by the fact that the phonologists of the Western countries were to realize the functional specificity as well as the structural autonomy of other than 'purely communicative' phonic facts much later — roughly, at the end of the nineteen-forties.15 It is only to be regretted that the premature death as well as adverse working conditions prevented the highly original scholar to further develop his ingenious ideas outlined as early as at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties. JOSEF VACHEK 14 For other instances of the kind, see J. VACHEK, Notes on Gender in Modern English. Sborník praci fil. fak. Brno A12 (1964): 189-194. 15 See especially С. C. FRIES—K. L. PIKE, Coexistent Phonemic Systems. Language 26. (1949): 29-60.