london school

Certain Criticisms
• There are certain criticisms on Firth. • First, he failed to provide a complete and systematic account of his own theory. And one can hardly find any relationship between his various paper. • Second, he failed to put forward a set of terms or categories to integrate descriptions on various levels. • Last, his papers are not reader-friendly, loaded with vague and ambiguous wording that is difficult to understand.
Context of situation
• Firth is noted for drawing attention to the context-dependent nature of meaning with his notion of "context of situation." The theory of the “context of the situation” became central to his approach to linguistics. For Firth, language was not to be studied as a mental system.
• Rather, in the spirit of positivism and behaviorism, he argued that language represents a set of events which speakers uttered—an action one learned in doing things. He believed that whatever anyone said must be understood in the context of the situation. Thus, besides linguistic factors, factors like the status and personal history of the speaker, as well as the social character of the situation, must also be taken into account. Firth described the "typical" context of situation as the occasions where we use ready-made, socially-prescribed phrases such as “How do you do?”
J. R. Firth
J. R. Firth, was an English inguist. He was Professor of English at the University of Punjab from 1919-1928.
• J. R. Firth ,an English linguist, the first professor of general linguistics in Great Britain, was the originator of the London School of Linguistics and played important role in the foundation of linguistics as an autonomous discipline, famous for his ideas on phonology and the study of meaning.
• Third, situations in which speech is used to fill a speech vacuum---PHATIC COMMUNION, refers to the cases of “language used in free, aimless, social intercourse”. Malinowski believed that although there is no relationship between the meaning of narration and the situation in which language is used, narration can change the hearer’s social attitudes and emotions.
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (1884–1942) was a Polish-bornBritish-naturalized anthropologist, one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists .
Prosodic Analysis
• Firth also greatly contributed to prosody, the study of rhythm, intonation, and related attributes in speech. He first set out his phonological ideas on prosody in his Sounds and Prosodies. He pointed out that in actual speech, it is phonematic units that make up the paradigmatic relations.
• Although he did not define prosodic units, his discussion indicates that prosodic units include stress, length, nasalization, palatalisation and aspiration. An emphasis on polysystemic analysis does not mean a neglect of structural analysis, on the contrary, he attached great importance to syntagmatic relations. He held that basic unit in analyzing speech is not word, but text in particular contexts of situation.
• Malinowski’s theory is based on two observations. • First, there is no writing in primitive communities there is no writing, and language has only one type of use. • Second, in all societies, children learn their languages in this way. He also believed that utterance and situation are bound up inextricably with each other and the context of situation is indispensible for the understanding of the words.
• M distinguished three types of context of situation: First, situations in which speech interrelates with bodily activity, which means that the meaning of a word is not given by the physical properties of its referent, but by its functions. Second, narrative situations---the situation of the moment of narration is “made up of the respective social, intellectual and emotional attitudes of these present”.
• The most important part of his theory is concerning the functioning of language. He thought that language as a “means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener” was a myth. According to him, the meaning of an utterance does not come from its relation to situational context in which the utterance occurs.
• As we know Firth was the M’s students, so Firth’s theory was deeply influenced by M. and also inherited some tradition from Saussure’s. Firth regarded language as a social process, as a means of social life, rather than simply as a set of agreed-upon semiotics and signs. He thought that human beings have to learn in order to live and learning language is a means of participation in social activities. Language is means of doing things and of making others do things. It is a means of acting and living.