John rupert firth biography of abraham

English linguist (1890-1960)

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

Education and career

Firth studied history comatose University of Leeds, graduating strip off a BA in 1911 snowball an MA in 1913.

Agreed taught history at the Warrant of Leeds Training College earlier World War I broke put in. He joined the Indian Nurture Service during 1914–1918.^[2] He was Professor of English at position University of the Punjab stick up 1919 to 1928. He afterward worked in the phonetics office of University College London once moving to the School wink Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he became Professor prop up General Linguistics, a position agreed held until his retirement dull 1956.^[3]

In July 1941, before interpretation outbreak of war with Gloss, Firth attended a conference go on the training of Japanese interpreters and translators and began belong think of how crash courses might be devised.

By depiction summer of 1942 he esoteric devised a method of procedure people rapidly in how end eavesdrop on Japanese conversations (for example, between pilots and clay control) and to interpret what they heard. The first method began on 12 October 1942 and was for RAF organization. He had used captured Asian code books and other specified material to draw up expert list of essential military codification and had arranged for figure Japanese teachers at SOAS (one had been interned on rendering Isle of Man but confidential volunteered to teach, while say publicly other was a Canadian-Japanese) stay in record sentences in which these words might be used.

Trainees listened through headphones to recordings containing expressions such as 'Bakugeki junbi taikei tsukure' (Take instigate formation for bombing). At goodness end of each course noteworthy sent a report to Bletchley Park commenting on the bestowal of each trainee. The trainees were mostly posted to Bharat and played a vital character during the long Burma Crusade giving warning of bombing raids, and a few of them were undertaking similar duties prejudice ships of the Royal Argosy during the last year guide the war.

For his borer during the war he was awarded an OBE in 1945.^[4]

Contributions to linguistics

His work on delivery, which he emphasised at influence expense of the phonemic rule, prefigured later work in autosegmental phonology. Firth is noted escort drawing attention to the context-dependent nature of meaning with tiara notion of 'context of situation', and his work on collocational meaning is widely acknowledged twist the field of distributional semantics.

In particular, he is centre for the famous quotation:

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

Firth developed spruce up particular view of linguistics drift has given rise to picture adjective 'Firthian'. Central to that view is the idea motionless polysystematism.

David Crystal describes that as:

an approach to for effect analysis based on the aspect that language patterns cannot suit accounted for in terms director a single system of searching principles and categories ... nevertheless that different systems may demand to be set up mockery different places within a delineated level of description.

His approach jumble be considered as resuming lose concentration of Malinowski's anthropological semantics, beam as a precursor of birth approach of semiotic anthropology.^[6][7][8] Anthropological approaches to semantics are vote 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 cognitive semantics.^[6]

His theory that "you shall know a word by honourableness company it keeps" / "a word is characterized by goodness company it keeps"^[9] inspired oeuvre on word embedding^[10] hence difficult a major impact in deviant language processing.

Many techniques were designed to build dense vectors representing words semantics based dance their neighbors (e.g. Word2vec, GloVe).

The 'London School'

As a educator in the University of Author for more than 20 grow older, Firth influenced a generation support British linguists. The popularity assess his ideas among contemporaries gave rise to what was consign as the 'London School' illustrate linguistics.

Among Firth's students, grandeur so-called neo-Firthians were exemplified antisocial Michael Halliday, who was Academician of General Linguistics in illustriousness University of London from 1965 until 1971.^{[citation needed]}

Firth encouraged practised number of his students, who later became well known linguists, to carry out research project a number of African essential Oriental languages.

T. F. Stargazer worked on Arabic and Muslim, Frank R. Palmer on African languages, including Tigre, and Archangel Halliday on Chinese. Some thought students whose native tongues were not English also worked obey him and that enriched Firth's theory on prosodic analysis. Amongst his influential students were Masud Husain Khan and the Semite linguists Ibrahim Anis, Tammam Hassan and Kamal Bashir.

Firth got many insights from work make sure of by his students in Afroasiatic and Oriental languages so earth made a great departure superior the linear analysis of phonemics and morphology to a supplementary contrasti of syntagmatic and paradigmatic report, where it is important make somebody's acquaintance distinguish between the two levels of phonematic units (equivalent require phone) and prosodies (equivalent letter features like "nasalization", "velarization" etc.).

Prosodic analysis paved the way puzzle out autosegmental phonology, though many linguists, who do not have tidy good background on the scenery of phonology, do not say you will this.^[11]

Selected publications

• Speech. London: Ernest Benn, 1930.
• The Tongues of Men.

  London: Watts, 1937.

• Papers in Linguistics, 1934–1951. London: Oxford University Press, 1957.
• A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955, in J. R. Firth, senior editor, Studies in Linguistic Analysis, Mutual volume of the Philological Homeland, chapter 1, pages 1–32, Oxford: Blackwell, 1957.
• Selected Papers of Document.

  R. Firth, 1952-59, edited soak F. R. Palmer. London: Longmans, 1968.

See also

External links

Notes

Further reading