Summary of London School of Thought in Linguistics

The pure academic discipline of linguistics which emerged in Britain focussed on phonetics.
Henry
Sweet was the greatest of the few historical linguists whom Britain produced.Sweet based his
historical studies on a detailed understanding of the workings of the vocal organs. Sweet’s 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. 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 orthography.
Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones, who took the subject up as a
hobby. Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training the practical
skills perceiving, transcribing and reproducing minute distinctions of speech sound; he invented the
system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the
case of vowels.
The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain was
J.R.Firth. One of the principal features of Firth’s treatment of phonology is that it is poly systemic, to
use Firth’s term. According to Firth, the phonology of a language consists of a number of systems of
alternative possibilites which come into play at different points in a phonological unit such as a
syllabe, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.A
Firthian phonological analysis recognizes a number of systems of prosodies operating at various
points in structure which determine the pronounciation of a given form in interaction with segment-
sized, phonematic units that represent whatever information is left when all the co-occurence
restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies. One result of this is
that the utterances are represented as having a phonological hierarchical structure, in addition to
the syntactic hierarchical structure which they are widely recognized as possessing. Prosodic theory
thus finds rom naturally for such multi segment units as the syllable, which has been a long standing
puzzle for both Descriptivists and generative phonologists. In Firthian terms, the syllable plays an
essential role as the domain of a large number prosodies.Firth insisted that sound and meaning in
language were more directly related than they are usually taken to be. He seemed reluctant even to
regard expression and content as distinct sides of the same coin, in the Saussurean way and he was
wholly unwilling to acknowledge the indirectness of the expression/content relationship suggested
by Martinet’s slogan about double articulation.For Firth, phonology was a structure of systems of
choices, and systems of choices were systems of meaning.The notion that meaning is to be stated in
terms of observables, allied to the fairly flexible concept of context suggests two approaches to
semantics, and Firth advocated both approaches at different points in his writings.
Malirtowski clarifies his idea of meaning by appealing to a notion of context of situation. He makes
the point that a European, suddenly jumped into a Trobriand community and given a word by word
translation of the Trobrianders’ utterances, would be no nearer understanding them than if the
utterace remained untranslated. To understand an utterance in an alien langauge is not just to
equate it with some element of one’s own language but us rather to know its position in a complex
network of sense-relationships which it contracts with other elements of the alien language.
The major difficulty in systemic grammar concerns the essential role that intuition appears to play in
systemic analysis.Choamsky and his followers claim to rely on intimation- what it makes predictions
about the word sequences which speakers do and do not use, and that is an observable chatter. The
question whether or not certain constructions express different cases of a single semantic category
and therefore belong together in one system may be unavoidably an intuitive decision, in which case
systemic grammar cannot hope to rank as a science.On the other hand, it might be that if systemic
linguists render the rules of realizing choices as explicit as the rules for making choices, critieria for
overall simpliciity might determine the analysis into systems independently of intutions about
meaning.
All in all, London School would appear to have a good deal to offer. Where it fails completely, with
respect to its notion of meaning, all other linguistics schools have likewise failed. Systemic syntax
seems well worth consideration as an alternative, not necessarily exclusive, to more fashionable
approaches and prosodic phonology is in my judgement more nearly right than any other
phonological theory.
The British Empire was to the London School what the American Indian was to the American
Discriptivists, in the sense that both groups were inoculated by the quantitites of unfamiliar data
against the arid apriorism that disfigures some Continental and most Choamskyan linguistics.
There was a large difference though: the Americans were dealing largely with the 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 plenty of speakers and
which faced the task of evolving into efficient vehicles of communication for modern
civilizations.This means that the practical aspect of British linguistic tradition was reinforced.It also
meant that London linguists were prepared to spend their time on relatively abstuse theorizing
based on limited areas of data; they did not feel the same pressure as the Americans to the the raw
facts down before it was too late.

Summary of London School of Thought in Linguistics

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Summary of London School of Thought in Linguistics

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The pure academic discipline of linguistics which emerged in Britain focussed on phonetics.

You might also like