Firth and the London School of Linguistics

Abstract

This chapter highlights the work of John Rupert Firth in the field of linguistics. John Rupert Firth was Professor and Head of the Department of General Linguistics in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics in the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London from 1941–1956, after having served as Senior Lecturer and as Reader in that Department from 1938. A second theory with which Firth is closely associated is that of “context of situation.” The title of the 1935 paper, “Techniques of semantics,” is significant; it is concerned with techniques for language description that, Firth later stated, consisted of “a range of abstracted levels that were not to be confused with Bloomfield's “levels of analysis.” Unfortunately, Firth has very little else of real significance on grammar, although there are interesting observations on the grammars of languages, particularly English, in several of his papers. He emphasized the need for grammar to be formal, rejecting the idea of universal grammatical categories, and insisted on the abstract nature of the grammatical elements.