The London School
Introduction
The London School of Linguistics is involved with the study
of language on the descriptive plane (synchrony), the distinguishing of
structural (syntagmatic) and systemic (paradigmatic) 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)
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
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 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
artifact 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
neo-Firthian theories.
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق