The London School

The London School

¢  Linguistic description evolves a standard language since eleventh century.

¢  Henry Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the working of the vocal organs. He was concerned with the systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform-.

Phonetics

Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized in an ideal system of orthography

¢  Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of through training in the practical skills of 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. 

Linguistics

¢  J.R. Firth turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject.

¢  Firth said that the phonology of a language consist of a number of system of alternative possibilities which come into play at different points in phonological unit such a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.

School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas)

¢  It was founded in 1916.

London linguistics was a brand of linguistics in which theorizing was controlled by healthy familiarity with realities of alien tongues.

¢  A Firthian phonologycal analysis recognizes a number of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units.

¢  The terminological distinction between ‘prosodies’ and ‘phonematic units’ could as well be thought of as ‘prosodies’ that happen to be only one segment long.

¢  It is a characteristic of the Firthian approach to be much more concerned with the ‘systems’ of choices between alternatives which occur in a language than with the details of how particular alternatives are realized.

¢  Linguistics of the London School have done much  more work on the analysis of intonation that have Americans of any camp and the Brithis work.

¢  To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski, professor of Anthropology at the London School.

¢  Words are tools, and the ‘meaning’ of a tool is its use.

¢  Firth accepted Malinowski’s view of language. Firth uses the word ‘meaning’, which occurs frequently in his writings, in rather bizarre ways.

¢  Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentences that one’s language makes available.

¢  To make this clearer, we may contrast the systemic approach with Chomsky´s approach to grammar. A Chomskyan grammar defines the class of well-formed sentences in a language by providing a set of rules for rewriting symbols as other symbols.