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The London School

1. Introduction The London School of Linguistics is involved with the studyof language on the descriptive plane (synchrony), the distinguishing of

structural (syntagmatics) and systemic (paradigmatics) concepts, and the

social aspects of language. Semantics is in the forefront.

2. The schools primary contribution to linguistics has been the situationaltheory of meaning in semantics (the dependence of the meaning of a

linguistic unit on its use in a standard context by a definite person;

functional variations in speech are distinguished on the basis of typical

contexts) and the prosodic analysis in phonology (the consideration of the

phenomena accruing to a sound: the number and nature of syllables, the

character of sound sequences, morpheme boundaries, stress, and so on).

3. The distinctive function is considered to be the primary function of aphoneme. The London school rejects the concepts of the speech collective

and social experience and studies the speech of the individual person; it is

subject to terminological and methodological inaccuracy and proves in

many aspects to be linguistics of speech and not language.

4. The London School of Linguistics had three main representatives:a) Henry Sweet (1845 - 1912). English philologist, phonetician and

grammarian. As a philologist, he specialized in the Germanic

languages, particularly Old English and Old Norse. In addition, Sweet

published works on larger issues of phonetics and grammar in

language and the teaching of languages. Many of his ideas have

remained influential, and a number of his works continue to be in

print, being used as course texts at colleges and universities.

b) Daniel Jones (1881 - 1967). British phonetician. He was involved inthe development of the International Phonetic Alphabet from 1907

and went on to invent the system of cardinal vowels and produce the

English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917).

c) John Rupert Firth (1890 - 1960): Commonly known as J. R. Firth, wasan English linguist. He was Professor of English at the University of

the Punjab from 19191928. He then worked in the phonetics

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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.

5.

British StructuralismDaniel Jones took up and extended Sweets workonphonetics. His work was highly influential in thedevelopment of

phonetics, and his books Outline ofEnglish phonetics (1914) and English

pronouncingdictionary were widely used throughout the world.

6. But general linguistics in Britain really began with thework of J.R. Firth,who held the first chair in linguistics,in the University of London, from

1944 to 1956. Firth,who had lived for some time in India and studied

itslanguages, brought a number of original andprovocative perspectives

to linguistics; the tradition heestablished is called the London School.

Among otherthings, he questioned the assumption that speech canbe

divided into segments of sound strung one after theother, regarding this

as an artefact of alphabetic scriptsused by westerners.

7. His theory of prosodic analysis focused on phoneticelements larger thanindividual sounds, and anticipatedsome developments in phonology by

half a century. Firthwas also deeply concerned with meaning, and,

influencedby the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884

1942), developed (at least in outline) a contextual theory ofmeaning that

accorded a crucial role to use in context embodied in the aphorism

meaning is use in context.

8. Firth did not develop a fully articulated theory of grammar, butrather laidout the framework on which a theory could bedeveloped. One of his

students, Michael Alexander KirkwoodHalliday (often M.A.K. Halliday)

(1925) was responsible forelaborating Firths ideas and developing them

into a coherenttheory of language. From the late 1950s, Halliday refined

atheory that ultimately came to be known as systemic

functionalgrammar; Hallidays ideas have attracted a considerable

amountof attention, especially in applied linguistics, and the tradition

hebegan is represented in Britain, Australia, America, Spain, China,and

Japan.

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9. But Firths ideas were developed in other ways as well,including by otherstudents, and their students. In fact,Firths singular approach remains a

source ofinspiration to many, and has spawned a range of neo-Firthian

theories.