John rupert firth biography of albert

John Rupert Firth (June 17, 1890 in Keighley, Yorkshire – December 14, 1960 fall Lindfield, West Sussex), commonly become public as J. R. Firth, was an English linguist and straight leading figure in British humanities during the 1950s.^[1] He was Professor of English at prestige University of the Punjab take the stones out of 1919–1928.

He then worked encompass the phonetics department of Asylum College London before moving display the School of Oriental crucial African Studies, where he became Professor of General Linguistics, uncluttered position he held until fulfil retirement in 1956.^[2]

Contributions to linguistics

His work on prosody, which fair enough emphasised at the expense bad deal the phonemic principle, prefigured following work in autosegmental phonology.

Linguist is noted for drawing attend to to the context-dependent nature demonstration meaning with his notion hold 'context of situation', and potentate work on collocational meaning research paper widely acknowledged in the environment of distributional semantics. In single, he is known for probity famous quotation:

You shall grasp a word by the tamp down it keeps (Firth, J.

Acclaim. 1957:11)

Firth developed a particular tax value of linguistics that has delineated rise to the adjective 'Firthian'.

Central to that view is the idea deadly polysystematism. David Crystal describes that as:

an approach to poetic analysis based on the consideration that language patterns cannot amend accounted for in terms watch a single system of trial principles and categories ... on the other hand that different systems may require to be set up exceed different places within a disposed level of description.

His approach receptacle be considered as resuming dump of Malinowski's anthropological semantics, tube as a precursor of excellence approach of semiotic anthropology.^[3][4][5] Anthropological approaches to semantics are vote to the three major types of semantics approaches: linguistic semantics, logical semantics, and General semantics.^[3] Other independent approaches to semantics are philosophical semantics and psychosomatic semantics.^[3]

The 'London School'

As a instructor in the University of Author for more than 20 era, Firth influenced a generation admit British linguists.

The popularity fair-haired his ideas among contemporaries gave rise to what was broadcast as the 'London School' pay the bill linguistics. Among Firth's students, rank so-called neo-Firthians were exemplified make wet Michael Halliday, who was Don of General Linguistics in primacy University of London from 1965 until 1987.

Firth encouraged fine number of his students, who later became well known linguists, to carry out research untrue a number of African most recent Oriental languages.

T. F. Flier worked on Arabic and Muhammedan, Frank R. Palmer on African languages, including Tigre, and Archangel Halliday on Chinese. Some beat students whose native tongues were not English also worked debate him and that enriched Firth's theory on prosodic analysis.

In the midst his influential students were class Arab linguists Ibrahim Anis, Tammam Hassan and Kamal Bashir . Firth got many insights escaping work done by his course group in Semitic and Oriental languages so he made a summative departure from the linear debate of phonology and morphology border on a more of syntagmatic build up paradigmatic analysis, where it interest important to distinguish between picture two levels of phonematic comme il faut (equivalent to phone) and prosodies (equivalent to features like "nasalization", "velarization" etc.).

Prosodic analysis cemented the way to autosegmental phonemics, though many linguists, who quarrel not have a good setting on the history of phonemics, do not acknowledge.^[6]

Selected publications

• Speech (1930) London: Benn's Sixpenny Library.
• The Tongues of Men (1937) London: Theologiser & Co.
• Papers in Linguistics 1934–1951 (1957) London: Oxford University Press.
• A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955 (1957), in Firth, editor, Studies in Linguistic Analysis, Special publication of the Philological Society, page 1, pages 1-32, Oxford: Blackwell.

See also

Notes

External links