Stuff!!!!

The London school

Tania Estefania Caballero Damian

Henry Sweet was the pioneer of phonetic study. He based his studies in the understanding of vocal organs. Daniel Jones continued Sweet’s approach to phonetics as a hobby.

J.R. Firth was the one who turned linguistics proper into a recognized distinct academic subject. He was the first professor in general linguistics in Great Britain. Until recently most teachers were trained under his aegis which consisted mostly in phonology and semantics.

Firth’s phonemic analysis was influenced by alphabetic writing with respect of the segmental principle (supersegmental units, such as phonemes of stress and phonemes of tone, which co-occur with whole syllables rather than forming part of particular vowels and consonants.

Firthian phonological analysis recognizes a number a number of systems of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine a pronunciation of a given form.

Firth insisted that sound and meaning had a lot more to do with each other than people thought they were.

Firth was probably influenced by Malinowski  and vice versa.

Firth’s two approaches to semantics:

On one he thought of human behavior during conversations to have observable and predictable patterns which changed meaning according to the context (the location of where the conversation occurred).

The other was to take context as the words that were next to a specific word.

London school has helped in the understanding of semantics. Syntactic analysis is called systemic grammar. In syntax the London School is more interested in stating the range of options open to the speaker than in specifying how a particular set of choices from the range available is realized as a sequence of words.

Systemic grammar aims rather to provide a taxonomy for sentences, a means of descriptively classifying particular sentences.

Halliday 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 highesd is the sentence. Any grammatical system will operate at a specific rank.

Delicacy is a scale of relative preciseness of grammatical statement.

In recent works systemicists have abandoned this two terms.

Pragmatics:

It questions the validity of the code-model of communication (if the message was the same from the beginning until it was received). The code-model has the merit of describing one way in which communication can be achieved.

One task of the pragmatics is to explain how the participants of a conversation move from a descontextualized meanings of words and phrases to their meaning in context.

Pragmatics takes a more psychological notion of context, like communicative acts instead of the place of action.