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 Context of situation

 Other basic ideas about the nature of


language
 Malinowski assumed about :
› Sentence
› Language

MEANING = USE

 Phatic Communion
 Translation
The work of J.R. FIRTH , and of the group
called the London School that has
succeeded him, is considering at this point,
since it in opposition to the tradition of
linguistic study in America as inaugurated
by Leonard Bloomfield.
The object to be studied in linguistics,
according to Firth, is language in actual
use, since “using language is one of the
forms of human life, and speech is
immersed in the immediacy of social
intercourse .
 The purpose of the study
 The method of the study
 Firth recognized that his terminology is
idiosyncratic.
 Although Firth would have denied
vehemently that he was a structuralist if
the term is taken to mean that he was
aligned with the principles of the
phonemicists, he was certainly a
structuralist in the De Saussurean sense.
 the principal components of the whole
meaning are the phonetic function and the
major functions of lexical, morphological,
and syntactic items, and of the whole
context of situation.
 The first level is that of phonetics
 The second level is lexical
 The third level that Firth cited is the
grammatical
 A fourth level is the situational
 For Firth, the study of language was the
study of meaning it is interesting that, in
view of the fact that both he and
Bloomfield advocated a situational
approach to meaning, one of the
weakness Firth found in Bloomfield’s
otherwise laudable work was a “rejection of
meaning”.
 Firth’s characteristic contributions
 Firth’s thought the phonological level of
language
 The Prosodic approach
 Prosodies
 Difference between phoneme and
phonematic units
› Phonetic desciption of an English Word
“Key”

• Sentence prosody : intonation


 There are Two principal objection to
american (principally,bloomfieldian or
post-bloomfield ) structuralism.
 system and structure.
 The second objection that prisodist raise
againts phonemic procedures is the
notion of redundancy.
 Information theory support the notion
of redundancy , allen thinks this is beside
the point ;
 The phonetic features usually assigened
to prodies in this system and deal with in
phonemic pratice in some terms ....
The main object of firth and the prosodists
phonemically based linguistic seems to have
stemmed more from their interest in making an
over-all statement of the nature of linguistic
relations than from their particular preference
for one kind of phonology over another.
Firth appears to have pointed out one of the
weakness pf the Bloomfield approach, which
worked basically with differential function of
linguistics signal, both phonological and
grammartical.

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