A Firthian phonological analysis...

Recognizes a number of 'systems' of prosodies operating at various points in structure, which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units that represent  whatever information is left when all the co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies. (The terminological distinction between 'prosodies' and 'phonematic units' is not essential -'phonematic units' could as well be thought of as 'prosodies' that happen to be only one segment long.) One result of this is that utterances are presented as having a phonological hierarchical  structure, in addition to the syntactic hierarchical structure which they are widely recognized as possessing. Prosodic theory thus finds room naturally for such multi-segment units as the syllable, which has been a long-standing puzzle for both Descriptivists and generative phonologists: intuitively, and to the layman the syllable seems an important entity, yet in terms of phonemic or generative-phonological analysis syllables are purely arbitrary groupings of an intrinsically unstructured sequence of segments. In Firthian terms, on the other hand, the syllable plays an essential role as the domain of a large number of prosodies. In other writing (Sampson 1970) I have argued that there are facts about what is commonly regarded as segmental phonology in certain languages which cannot be stated in general terms unless we recognize the kind of hierarchical phonological structure that Prosodic analysis implies.

School of Oriental and African Study (SOAS)

It is significant that British linguistics began at the School of Oriental and African Studies. SOAS, a constituent college of the University of London, was founded in 1916 as a very belated response by Government to the need for an institute to study the languages and cultures of the Empire. SOAS, was (and is) full of people who had spent much of their careers in first-hand contact with various exotic languages and cultures, so that London linguistics was a brand of linguistics in which theorizing was controlled by healthy familiarity with the realities of alien tongues. (Firth himself thought and wrote a good deal about several Indian and some other languages.) The British Empire was to the London School what the American Indian was to American Descriptivists, in the sense that both groups were inoculated by quantities of unfamiliar data against the arid apriorism that disfigures some Continental and most Chomskyan linguistics.

There was a difference, though: the Americans were dealing largely with languages on the verge of extinction, which needed to be recorded for their scientific interest as a matter of urgency, while London linguists were typically dealing with languages that had plenty of speakers and which faced the task of evolving into efficient vehicles of communication for modern civilizations. This meant, on the one hand, that the practical aspect of the British linguistics tradition was reinforced: issues such as the creation of writing systems and national-language planning loomed large, and Firth taught courses on the sociology of language in the 1930's, long before that subject appeared on  the American linguistic agenda. Paradoxically, it also meant that London linguists were prepared to spend their time on relatively abstruse theorizing based on limited areas of data; they did not fell the same pressure as the Americans to get the raw facts down before it was too late. Hindustani with its eighty million or more speakers was not going to be lost to science because one spent a year or two polishing and re-polishing one's elegant abstract analysis of six of its irregular verbs. Supporters and critics alike agree that Firth's own work suffers by being too fragmentary and programmatic; few attempts at complete descriptions of language emerged from London School.

J.R. Firth

Firth, a Yorkshireman, read history as an undergraduate, before soldiering in various parts of the Empire during the First World War. He was Professor of English at the University of the Punjab from 1919 to 1928, and returned in the latter year to a post in the phonetics department of University College, London. In 1938 Firth moved to the linguistics department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, where in 1944 he became the first Professor of General Linguistics in Great Britain (his department, itself the fist of its kind in the country, had been established only in 1932). Until quite recently, the majority of university teachers of linguistics in Britain were people who had trained under Firth’s aegis and whose work reflected his ideas, so that, although linguistics eventually began to flourish in a number of the other locations, the name ‘London School’ is quite appropriate for the distinctively British approach to the subject.


Firth's own theorizing concerned mainly phonology and semantics, which we shall consider in that order.
One of the principal features of Firth's treatment of phonological is that it is polysystemic, to the  Firth's term.


Firth argues, that phonetmicists are led into error by the neture of European writing systems. A phonemic transcription, afterl all, represents a fully consistent application of the particular principles of orthography on which European alphabetic scripts happen to be more or less accurately based. It is natural that scholars working with Oriental cultures, many of which had scripts based on other principles and whose traditions of philological discourse were independent of European thought, should be sceptical about elevating their own tribal speech-notation system into an axiom of science.

Daniel Jones

He took the subjects up as a hobby, suggested to the authorities of University College, London, that they ought to consider teaching the phonetics of French, was taken on as a lecture there in 1907 and build up what become the first University department of phonetics in Britain. Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinction of speech-sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels. Thanks to the traditions established by Sweet and Jones, the ‘ear training’ aspect of phonetics plays a large part in University courses in linguistics in Britain, and British linguistic research tends to be informed by meticulous attention to phonetic detail. 

American linguistics, like many other aspects of American scholarship, was more influenced by German than by British practice. As a result, even the Descriptivists in America were startlingly cavalier by comparison with their British  counterparts about the phonetic facts of the languages they described (while, for the Chomskyans,  it is a point of principle of ignore 'mere phonetic detail').

The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R. Firth(1890-1960).

Henry Sweet

Sweet was the greatest of the few historical linguists whom Britain produced in the nineteenth century to rival the burgeoning of historical linguistics in Germany, but, unlike the German scholars, Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the workings of the vocal organs. (Such phonetic research as took place in Germany was carried out mainly by physiologists with little interest in linguistic questions.) According to C.T. Onions in the Dictionary of National Biography, Sweet’s Handbook of Phonetics of 1877 ‘taught phonetics to Europe and made England the birthplace of the modern science’. (Sweet was the original of ‘Professor Higgins’ in Shaw’s Pygmalion, turned into a musical under the title of My Fair Lady. He worked as a private scholar throughout his life; largely because of personal animosities, and to the amazement of foreign linguists, he was never appointed to any of the academic positions to which his work and publications entitled him).

Sweets phonetics was practical as well as academic; he was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform-the full title of the handbook just cited continuous with the words including a popular exposition of the principles of spelling reform. Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which for him was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized in an ideal system of orthographic.
Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones (1881-1967).

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The London School

England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an unusually long history. Linguistic descripcion becomes a matter of practical importance to a nation when it evolves a standard or 'official' language itself out of the welter of diverse and conflicting local usages normally found in any territory that has been settled for a considerable time, and it happens that this respect England was, briefly, far in advance of Europe. Elsewhere, the cultural dominance of Latin together with this supranational medieval wolrd-view made contemporary languages seem to be mere vulgar local vernaculars unworthy of serious study; both England was already developing a recognized standard language by eleventh century.
The Conquest obviously destroyed this incipient advance; and, qhen Latin lost its role and cultures began to fission along national lines in the Renascence, other countries turned to the task of standardizing their languages sooner than we. But, from the sixteenth century onwards, England was remarkable for the extent to which various aspects of 'practical linguistics' flourished here, by which term I refer to such activities as orthoepy (the codification and teaching), lexicography, invention of shorthand systems, spelling reform, and the creation of artificial ‘philosophical languages’ such as those of George Dalgarno and John Wilkins. All there pursuits require or induce in their practitioners a considerable degree of sophistication about matters linguistic.


One consequence of this tradition for the pure academic discipline of linguistics which emerged in Britain in our own time was an emphasis (as mentioned in the previous chapter) on phonetics. Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by Henry Sweet (1845-1912).