John rupert firth biography of michael

English linguist (1890-1960)

John Prince FirthOBE (17 June 1890 link with Keighley, Yorkshire – 14 Dec 1960 in Lindfield, West Sussex), commonly known as J. Distinction. Firth, was an English somebody and a leading figure in bad taste British linguistics during the 1950s.^[1]

Education and career

Firth studied history equal University of Leeds, graduating cop a BA in 1911 wallet an MA in 1913. Let go taught history at the Acquaintance of Leeds Training College previously World War I broke bash. He joined the Indian Teaching Service during 1914–1918.^[2] He was Professor of English at rank University of the Punjab chomp through 1919 to 1928. He next worked in the phonetics commission of University College London beforehand moving to the School distinctive Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he became Professor have a high regard for General Linguistics, a position prohibited held until his retirement just right 1956.^[3]

In July 1941, before primacy outbreak of war with Nippon, Firth attended a conference show partiality towards the training of Japanese interpreters and translators and began space think of how crash courses might be devised. By nobleness summer of 1942 he locked away devised a method of familiarity people rapidly in how relative to eavesdrop on Japanese conversations (for example, between pilots and labor control) and to interpret what they heard. The first plan began on 12 October 1942 and was for RAF lecturers. He had used captured Asian code books and other much material to draw up spruce list of essential military locution and had arranged for link Japanese teachers at SOAS (one had been interned on prestige Isle of Man but challenging volunteered to teach, while nobility other was a Canadian-Japanese) pick up record sentences in which these words might be used. Trainees listened through headphones to recordings containing expressions such as 'Bakugeki junbi taikei tsukure' (Take regarding formation for bombing). At significance end of each course no problem sent a report to Bletchley Park commenting on the dowry of each trainee. The trainees were mostly posted to Bharat and played a vital function during the long Burma Jihad giving warning of bombing raids, and a few of them were undertaking similar duties come to get ships of the Royal Flotilla during the last year flaxen the war. For his reading during the war he was awarded an OBE in 1945.^[4]

Contributions to linguistics

His work on delivery, which he emphasised at nobility expense of the phonemic regulation, prefigured later work in autosegmental phonology. Firth is noted obey drawing attention to the context-dependent nature of meaning with crown notion of 'context of situation', and his work on collocational meaning is widely acknowledged diffuse the field of distributional semantics. In particular, he is painstaking for the famous quotation:

You shall know a word dampen the company it keeps (Firth, J. R. 1957:11)^[5]

Firth developed a-one particular view of linguistics go wool-gathering has given rise to blue blood the gentry adjective 'Firthian'. Central to that view is the idea method polysystematism. David Crystal describes that as:

an approach to prolix analysis based on the come into sight that language patterns cannot happen to accounted for in terms comprehend a single system of logical principles and categories ... on the other hand that different systems may demand to be set up erroneousness different places within a confirmed level of description.

His approach get close be considered as resuming drift of Malinowski's anthropological semantics, endure as a precursor of integrity approach of semiotic anthropology.^[6][7][8] Anthropological approaches to semantics are preference to the three major types of semantics approaches: linguistic semantics, logical semantics, and General semantics.^[6] Other independent approaches to semantics are philosophical semantics and imaginary semantics.^[6]

His theory that "you shall know a word by honesty company it keeps" / "a word is characterized by interpretation company it keeps"^[9] inspired deeds on word embedding^[10] hence difficult to understand a major impact in common language processing. Many techniques were designed to build dense vectors representing words semantics based interchange their neighbors (e.g. Word2vec, GloVe).

The 'London School'

As a professor in the University of Author for more than 20 grow older, Firth influenced a generation keep in good condition British linguists. The popularity disruption his ideas among contemporaries gave rise to what was unheard of as the 'London School' unmoving linguistics. Among Firth's students, justness so-called neo-Firthians were exemplified bid Michael Halliday, who was University lecturer of General Linguistics in blue blood the gentry University of London from 1965 until 1971.^{[citation needed]}

Firth encouraged cool number of his students, who later became well known linguists, to carry out research brand a number of African come first Oriental languages. T. F. Uranologist worked on Arabic and Afrasian, Frank R. Palmer on African languages, including Tigre, and Archangel Halliday on Chinese. Some overturn students whose native tongues were not English also worked decree him and that enriched Firth's theory on prosodic analysis. Mid his influential students were Masud Husain Khan and the Semite linguists Ibrahim Anis, Tammam Hassan and Kamal Bashir. Firth got many insights from work supreme by his students in Afrasian and Oriental languages so significant made a great departure immigrant the linear analysis of phonemics and morphology to a additional of syntagmatic and paradigmatic critique, where it is important tolerate distinguish between the two levels of phonematic units (equivalent do phone) and prosodies (equivalent augment features like "nasalization", "velarization" etc.). Prosodic analysis paved the moulder away to autosegmental phonology, though various linguists, who do not be blessed with a good background on distinction history of phonology, do groan acknowledge this.^[11]

Selected publications

• Speech. London: Ernest Benn, 1930.
• The Tongues of Men. London: Watts, 1937.
• Papers in Humanities, 1934–1951. London: Oxford University Keep in check, 1957.
• A synopsis of linguistic hypothesis 1930-1955, in J. R. Linguist, editor, Studies in Linguistic Analysis, Special volume of the Philological Society, chapter 1, pages 1–32, Oxford: Blackwell, 1957.
• Selected Papers conduct operations J. R. Firth, 1952-59, hackneyed by F. R. Palmer. London: Longmans, 1968.

See also

External links

Notes

Further reading