Firth's approach to linguistics is rooted in practical applications, emphasizing language as it is used in real-world contexts. His background as an English professor in India shaped his perspective, leading him to focus on the sociolinguistic aspects of language learning and teaching. He introduced the concept of the 'context of situation' to illustrate the importance of situational factors in language use. Firth's theories evolved through various works rather than a single definitive text, highlighting a dynamic and iterative process of intellectual development.
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In this episode, we look at the central role the analysis of meaning played in British linguistics in the first half of the twentieth century. We focus on the work of John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) and Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) and their varying versions of the ‘context of situation’.
Firth, John Rupert (1957), Papers in Linguistics, 1934–1951, London: Oxford University Press. archive.org
Firth, John Rupert (1957), ‘A synopsis of linguistics theory, 1930–1955’, in Studies in Linguistic Analysis, ed. John Rupert Firth, 1–32, Oxford: Blackwell.
Firth, John Rupert (1964 [1930 & 1937]), The Tongues of Men (1937) and Speech (1930), Oxford: Oxford University Press. archive.org
Malinowski, Bronisław (1923), ‘The problem of meaning in primitive languages’, in Ogden & Richards (1923), 296–336.
Malinowski, Bronisław (1935), Coral Gardens and their Magic, 2 vols., London: Allen & Unwin.
Ogden, Charles Kay and Ivor Armstrong Richards (1923), The Meaning of Meaning, London: Kegan Paul. (Reprinting of tenth edition with finger: archive.org)
Orwell, George (1949), Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Secker & Warburg.
Palmer, Frank R., ed. (1968), Selected Papers of J. R. Firth, 1952–59, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Secondary Sources
Honeybone, Patrick (2005), ‘J.R. Firth’, in Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language, ed. by S. Chapman and P. Routledge, 80–86, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Author’s copy
Joseph, John E., Nigel Love & Talbot J. Taylor (2001), Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II: The Western tradition in the twentieth century, London: Routledge. See chap. 5, ‘Firth on language and context’.
McElvenny, James (2018), Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C. K. Ogden and his contemporaries, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Rebori, Victoria (2002), ‘The legacy of J.R. Firth: A report on recent research’, Historiographia Linguistica 29:1/2, 165–190. (See also the follow-up discussion between Rebori and Leendert Plug in Historiographia Linguistica 31:2/3, 469–477 [2004].)
Senft, Gunter, Jan-Ola Östman & Jef Verschueren (2009), Culture and Language Use, Amsterdam: Benjamins. See the chapters ‘Firthian linguistics’ (pp. 140–145) by Jan-Ola Östman & Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen and ‘Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski’ (pp. 210–225) by Gunter Senft.
Young, Michael W. (2004), Malinowski: Odyssey of an anthropologist, 1884–1920, New Haven: Yale University Press.
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