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.