John Rupert Firth
John Rupert Firth (1890, Keighley, Yorkshire – 1960), commonly known as J. R. Firth, was an English linguist. He was Professor of English at the University of the Punjab from 1919-1928. He then worked in the phonetics department of University College London before moving to the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he became Professor of General Linguistics, a position he held until his retirement in 1956.
Contributions to linguistics
Firth developed an idiosyncratic view of linguistics that has given rise to the adjective 'Firthian'. Central to this view is the idea of polysystematism. David Crystal describes this as:
- an approach to linguistic analysis based on the view that language patterns cannot be accounted for in terms of a single system of analytic principles and categories[...]but that different systems may need to be set up at different places within a given level of description.
Firth is noted for drawing attention to the context-dependent nature of meaning with his notion of 'context of situation'. His work on prosody, which he emphasised at the expense of the phonemic principle, prefigured later work in autosegmental phonology.
In particular, he is known for the famous quotation:
- You shall know a word by the company it keeps
(Firth, J. R. 1957:11)
The 'London School'
As a teacher in the University of London for more than 20 years, Firth influenced a generation of British linguists. The popularity of his ideas among contemporaries gave rise to what was known as the 'London School' of linguistics. Among Firth's students, the so-called neo-Firthians were exemplified by Michael Halliday, who was Professor of General Linguistics in the University of London from 1965 until 1970.
See also
- Phonaestheme
Selected publications
- Speech (1930) London: Benn's Sixpenny Library.
- The Tongues of Men (1937) London: Watts & Co.
- Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951 (1957) London: Oxford University Press.
External links
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; from the article "J. R. Firth". Image Credit.
