The London School

England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an usually long History. Linguistics description becomes a matter of practical importance to a notion when it evolves a standard or official language.

The cultural dominance of Latin together with the supranational medieval world view made contemporary languages seem to be more vulgar local vernaculars unworthy of serious study; but England was already developing a recognized standard language by the eleven century.

Phonetic study in the modern senses was pioneered by Henry Sweet (1845-1912). Sweet was the greatest of the few historical linguists whom Britain produced in the nineteenth century to rival the burgeoning of historical linguistics in Germany, but, unlike the German, Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the working of the vocal organs.

Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones (1881-1967), who took the subject up as a hobby, suggested to the authorities of University Collage, London, that they ought to consider teaching the phonetic of French, was taken on a lecturer there in 1907 and built up what became the first university department of phonetics in Britain. Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech- sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference-points.

American linguistics, like many other aspects of American scholarship, was more influenced by German than by British practice.

The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R Firth (1980-1960). In 1938, Firth moved to the linguistics department of the school of Oriental and African Studies, where in 1944 he became the first Professor of General Linguistics in Great Britain.

The British Empire was to the London School what the American Indian was to American Descriptivists, in the sense that both group were inoculated by quantities of unfamiliar data against the arid apriorism that disfigures some Continental and most Chomskyan linguistics.

Firth’s own theorizing concerned mainly phonology and semantics, which we shall consider in that order. One of the principal features of Firth’s treatment of phonology is that it is polysystemic, to use Firth’s term.

The syllabic-nucleus system is simply different from the syllabic-margin system.

A firthian phonological analysis recognizes a number of systems of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given from in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units that represent whatever information is left when all the co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segment have been abstracted out as prosodies.

The syntactic hierarchical structure which they are widely recognized as possessing. Prosodic theory thus finds room naturally for such multi-segment units as the syllable, which has been a long-standing puzzles for both Descriptivists and generative phonologists.

Generative phonologists could capture the generalization about the similarity of vowels found in the same word by making frontness or backness, in the underlying from of any word, or only one of its vowels, say the first, and by writing a phonological rule saying in effect Make each vowel agree in frontness or backness with the first vowel of the word.

The firth´s notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942). Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics from 1927 onwards. The most important aspect of Malinowski´s theorizing as distinct from his purely ethnographic work concerned the functioning of language.

The notion of describing a semantic system as an unseen network of relationships in speakers mind is suspect one. The notion that meaning is to be stated in terms of observables, allied to the fairly flexible concept of context, suggests two possible approaches to semantics, and Firth advocated both approaches at different point in his writings.

Insofar as scholars trained within the London School have contributed to our understanding of semantics, as John Lyons in particular has done, they have achieved this by going beyond the framework of ideas shred by other members of the school.

Syntactic analysis in the London style is commonly called systematic grammar. A system in Firthian language, remember, is a set of mutually exclusive options that come into play at some point in a linguistic structure. This is the clue to London School syntax: like Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choice which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentences out of the infinitely numerous sentences that one´s language makes available.

Chomskyan grammars include  constituency base defining a range of deep structures as well as a set of transformational rules converting deep into surface structures; but many Chomskyans evince far more interest in details of the traditional rules than in the details of the base, and some of the younger group of generative semantics seem to take the constituency base completely for granted, so that they discuss exclusively the rules for converting underlying structures into pronounceable form.

The psychologist wants a theory that describes languages, so that he can see what kinds of languages human beings are capable of using.

Systematic grammar is held to be more relevant than transformational grammar are literary criticism, and language teaching.