The London School of Linguistics
Marianne Beltrán Saavedra
Mónica Yaresy Pachicano Niño
Lorena Isabel Ortegón de la Peña
Francisco 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 neoFirthian theories.