The Prague School of Linguistics and its Influence on New Testament Language Studies

Summary, in English

The period from 1910 to 1930 was a time when a number of theoretical systems saw the light of the day in Central Europe: psychoanalysis, neopositivism, phenomenology, the Warsaw School of logic, Gestalt-psychology and the structuralism of the Prague School of Linguistics. The Prague School arose in the liberal-minded Prague of the 1920s and came to have an enormous influence on multiple fields within world linguistics as well as other academic fields. The Prague School of linguistics, or the École de Prague, was established by Vilém Mathesius in the mid-1920s. The school had its most active time in the 1920s and 1930s, or more precisely, from 1926 to the outbreak of World War II. The instrumental role that the Prague School linguistics played for the development of structuralism and for integrating theoretical linguistics cannot be overrated.

This article addresses the relevance of the development of structuralism and functionalism within Prague School linguistics in relation to its adoption within New Testament Greek language studies. It is the thesis of this article that a great deal of the research that has been done within the disci- pline of New Testament language studies in the last decades, and especially the last 20 years, draws on ideas and concepts of the Prague School of Linguistics.

• Author: Jan H. Nylund
• Editor: Stanley E. Porter; Andrew W. Pitts
• Department/s: Biblical Studies
• Publishing year: 2013
• Language: English
• Pages: 155-221
• Publication/Series: Linguistic Biblical Studies
• Volume: 6
• Full text: - 1 MB; Download statistics
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004236400_009
• Document type: Book chapter
• Publisher: Brill
• Topic: Religious Studies
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1877-7554; ISBN: 978-90-04-23640-0; ISBN: 978-90-04-23477-2