John Rupert Firth (1890, Keighley, Yorkshire – 1960), commonly known as J. R. Firth, was an English linguist. He was Professor of English at the University of the Punjab from 1919-1928. He then worked in the phonetics department of University College London before moving to the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he became Professor of General Linguistics, a position he held until his retirement in 1956. 1890 (MDCCCXC) was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar). ... Statistics Population: 49,453 Ordnance Survey OS grid reference: SE058412 Administration District: City of Bradford Metropolitan county: West Yorkshire Region: Yorkshire and the Humber Constituent country: England Sovereign state: United Kingdom Other Ceremonial county: West Yorkshire Historic county: Yorkshire Services Police force: West Yorkshire Police Fire and rescue: {{{Fire}}} Ambulance... Look up Yorkshire in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Year 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 calendar). ... Motto: (French for God and my right) Anthem: God Save the King/Queen Capital London Largest city London Official language(s) English (de facto) Unification    - by Athelstan AD 927  Area    - Total 130,395 km² (1st in UK)   50,346 sq mi  Population    - 2005 est. ... University of the Punjab (PU) (Urdu: جامعه پنجاب) is located in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. ... University College London, commonly known as UCL, is one of the colleges that make up the University of London. ... The School of Oriental and African Studies (commonly abbreviated to SOAS) is a College of the University of London. ...

Contributions to linguistics

Firth developed an idiosyncratic view of linguistics that has given rise to the adjective 'Firthian'. Central to this view is the idea of polysystematism. David Crystal describes this as: Professor David Crystal, OBE (born 1941 in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, UK) is a linguist, academic and author. ...

an approach to linguistic analysis based on the view that language patterns cannot be accounted for in terms of a single system of analytic principles and categories[...]but that different systems may need to be set up at different places within a given level of description.

Firth is noted for drawing attention to the context-dependent nature of meaning with his notion of 'context of situation'. His work on prosody, which he emphasised at the expense of the phonemic principle, prefigured later work in autosegmental phonology. In linguistics, prosody refers to intonation, rhythm, and vocal stress in speech. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Autosegmental phonology is a modification of generative phonology introduced by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976. ...

The 'London School'

As a teacher in the University of London for more than 20 years, Firth influenced a generation of British linguists. The popularity of his ideas among contemporaries gave rise to what was known as the 'London School' of linguistics. Among Firth's students, the so-called neo-Firthians were exemplified by Michael Halliday, who was Professor of General Linguistics in the University of London from 1965 until 1970. Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (born 1925) is a linguist who developed an internationally influential grammar model, the systemic functional grammar (which also goes by the name of systemic functional linguistics [SFL]). In addition to English, the model has been applied to other languages, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European. ...

See also

• Phonaestheme

Phonestheme, also known as phonaestheme: a systematic pairing of form and meaning in a language, which is unlike a morpheme in that it does not meet the normal criterion of compositionality. ...

Selected publications

• Speech (1930) London: Benn's Sixpenny Library.
• The Tongues of Men (1937) London: Watts & Co.
• Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951 (1957) London: Oxford University Press.

External links

• Biographical article on J.R. Firth