Chomskyiers

The London School

Linguistic description becomes a matter of practical importance to a nation when it evolves a standard or “official” language for itself out of the welter of diverse and conflicting local usages normally found in any territory that has been settled for a considerable time, and it happens that in this respect England was, briefly, far in advance of Europe. From the sixteenth century, England was remarkable for the extent to which various aspects of “practical linguistics” flourished here: orthoepy, lexicography, invention of shorthand systems, spelling reform, and the creation of artificial systems.

Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by Henry Sweet, he was the greatest of the few historical linguistics whom Britain produced in the nineteenth century to rival the burgeoning of historical linguistics in Germany, but, unlike the German scholars based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the workings of the vocal organs. Sweet’s phonetics was practical as well academic; he was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language teaching. Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones.

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.

The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized distinct academic subject in Britain was J. R. Firth. Firth’s own theorizing concerned mainly phonology and semantics he said that the phonology of a language consists of a number of systems of alternative possibilities which come into play at different points in a phonological unit such as a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.

Firth argues that phonemicists are led into error by the nature of European writing systems. A phonemic transcription represents a fully consistent application of the particular principles of orthography on which European alphabetic scripts happen to be more or less accurately based. Polysystemic ignores a generalization about human language which is valid as a statistical tendency even if not as an absolute rule. Another respect in which Firth felt that phonemic analysis was unduly influenced by alphabetic writing was with respect to the segmental principle. A phonemic transcription, like a sentence in ordinary European orthography, consisted of a linear sequence of units.

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-ocurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies.

To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski for him to think about language as a “means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener’ was a misleading myth. Firth accepted Malinowski’s view of language, and indeed the two men probably each influenced the other in evolving what were ultimately very similar views.

Malinowski clarifies his idea of meaning by appealing to a notion of “context of situation”.

In a systematic grammar, on the other hand, 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- that is, one is told that a given system of alternatives comes into play if and only if such-and-such an option is chosen in another specified system, and so on.

As in the case of prosodic phonology, so in syntax the London School is more interested in stating the range of options open to the speaker than in specifying any particular set of choices from the range available is realized as a sequence of words.

In order to grasp the rationale of systemic grammar, it is important to appreciate that its advocates do not normally suggest that it is more successful than transformational grammar at carrying out the task for which the latter was designed- namely defining the range of grammatical sentences in a language.

Systematic grammarians claim, with some justice, that their sort of theory is much more relevant than the generative approach to the needs of various groups of people who deal with language.