In 1944, John Rupert Firth acceded to the Chair of General Linguistics at the University of London. His installation saw the formal beginning of the “London school,” a body of linguistic thought important primarily for its contributions to phonology and semantics, and influenced through Firth by the early work of Bronislaw Malinowski in semantics.
This book is the first historical account of the men and ideas of the London school written from a critical vantage point. Because the often obscure and programmatic character of Firth's descriptive linguistics has discouraged potential researchers in the past, the topic of the London school as a unified movement has been left virtually untouched until this time. In addition, no past analysis has set Firth's theories into a historical context. Professor Langendoen has in effect elucidated the Firthian tangle, first, by explaining the progression of the man's thought, and second, by showing its historical and theoretical connections with linguistic work going on in other countries at about the same time (1930-1960).
Trained linguistics, anthropologists, and semanticists, especially, will appreciate this study because of its thorough and chronological approach to Firth's work. The author progresses from Malinowski, whose thinking clearly impressed Firth in the early 1930's, to Firth's formulations of the phonological concept “prosodic analysis” and the semantic concept “meaning by collocation,” and finally, to 1948-1960 when students and colleagues of the London school began employing Firthian theories in their research. The concluding chapter contains discussion of twelve of these investigations, manifesting Firth's concept of prosodic analysis, in languages ranging from Arabic to Siamese to Sanskrit. Professor Langendoen has suggested alternative phonological considerations, according to the terms of the generative phonology theory of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, in the interest of implementing and criticizing the Firthian position.
MIT Press Research Monograph No. 46
