The London School of Linguistics

Marianne Beltrán SaavedraMónica Yaresy Pachicano NiñoLorena Isabel Ortegón de la PeñaFrancisco Alberto Espinoza Moreno

Introduction

The London School of Linguistics is involved with the study of 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.

The school’s primary contribution to linguistics has been the situational theory 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).

The distinctive function is considered to be the primary function of a phoneme. 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.

The London School of Linguistics had three main representatives:

• 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.

• Daniel Jones (1881 - 1967). British phonetician. He was involved in the 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).

• John Rupert Firth (1890 - 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.

British Structuralism

Daniel Jones took up and extended Sweet’s work on phonetics. His work was highly influential in the development of phonetics, and his books Outline of English phonetics (1914) and English pronouncing dictionary were widely used throughout the world.

But general linguistics in Britain really began with the work 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 its languages, brought a number of original and provocative perspectives to linguistics; the tradition he established is called the ‘London School’. Among other things, he questioned the assumption that speech can be divided into segments of sound strung one after the other, regarding this as an artefact of alphabetic scripts used by westerners.

His theory of prosodic analysis focused on phonetic elements larger than individual sounds, and anticipated some developments in phonology by half a century. Firth was also deeply concerned with meaning, and, influenced by the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), developed (at least in outline) a contextual theory of meaning that accorded a crucial role to use in context – embodied in the aphorism ‘meaning is use in context’.

Firth did not develop a fully articulated theory of grammar, but rather laid out the framework on which a theory could be developed. One of his students, Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M.A.K. Halliday) (1925–) was responsible for elaborating Firth’s ideas and developing them into a coherent theory of language. From the late 1950s, Halliday refined a theory that ultimately came to be known as systemic functional grammar; Halliday’s ideas have attracted a considerable amount of attention, especially in applied linguistics, and the tradition he began is represented in Britain, Australia, America, Spain, China, and Japan.

But Firth’s ideas were developed in other ways as well, including by other students, and their students. In fact, Firth’s singular approach remains a source of inspiration to many, and has spawned a range of neo-Firthian theories.