The London School

From t

The London School

From the sixteenth century onwards, England was remarkable for the extent to which various aspects of ‘practical linguistics’ flourished here.

One consequence of this tradition for the pure academic discipline of linguistics which emerged in Britain in our own time was an emphasis on phonetics. Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by Henry Sweet (1845-1912).

He was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform. Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which for him was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized in an ideal system of orthography.

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 phonetics of French.

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 which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels. Thanks to the traditions established by Sweet and Jones, the ‘ear-training’ aspect of phonetics plays a large part in university courses in linguistics in Britain, and British linguistics research tends to be informed by meticulous attention to phonetic detail.

The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R. Firth (1890-1960). He, in 1944, became the first Professor of General Linguistics in Great Britain, in the School of Oriental and African Studies (college of the University of London).

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.

Polysystemic principle ignores a generalization about human language which is valid as a statistical tendency even if not as an absolute rule. Firth’s theory could be said to meet Chomsky’s goal of providing simple descriptions for relatively ‘natural’ languages and complex descriptions for less natural languages.

A Firthian phonological 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 that represent whatever information is left when all the co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies. The syllable plays an essential role as the domain of a large number of prosodies.

Also, Firth insisted that sound and meaning in language were more directly related that they usually taken to be. For Firth, a phonology was a structure of systems of choices, and systems of choices were systems of meaning.

To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowsky (1884-1942). The most important aspect of Malinowski’s theorizing, as distinct from his purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language. For Malinowski’s, to think of language as a ‘means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener’ was a misleading myth; to speak, particularly in a primitive culture, is not to tell but to do.

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

Malinowski clarifies his idea of meaning by appealing to a notion of ‘context situation’.

To understand an utterance in an alien language is not just to equate it with some element of one’s own language but is rather to know its position in a complex network of sense-relationships which it contracts with other elements of the alien language.

-London approach to syntax

This draws heavily on Firthian principles which we have already encountered in connection with phonological analysis, but the application of these principles to syntax has been carried out by successors of Firth, notably Michael Hallyday, once Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Syntactic analysis in the London style is commonly called ‘systemic grammar’. A ‘system’ in Firthian language, remember, is a 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 choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentences that one’s language makes available.

In a systemic grammar, the central component is a chart of the full set of choices available in constructing a sentence, with a specification of the relationships between choices.

So in syntax the London School is more interested in stating the range of options open to the speaker than in specifying how any particular set of choices form the range available is realized as a sequence of words.

Margaret Berry’s introduction to systemic theory makes the astute point that, while Chomskyan linguistics appeals to the psychologist, systemic linguistics is more relevant for the sociologist. The sociologist wants to be able to describe any patterns that emerge in the particular choices that given types of individual make in given circumstances from the overall range provided by their language.

Hallyday introduces into syntax the notions ‘rank’ and ‘delicacy’. ‘Rank refers to a scale of sizes of grammatical unit, roughly speaking: the lowest-ranking unit is the morpheme, the highest-ranking is the sentence.

As for ‘delicacy’, this is a scale of relative preciseness of grammatical statement.

The major difficulty in systemic grammar concerns the essential role that intuition appears to play in systemic analysis.