The present paper is a report on research on the British linguist John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) carried out in Britain during the academic year 2000–2001. It sketches some characteristics of Firth’s personality, scholarly life and thinking based on two kinds of different sources: the testimonies of people who were close to him and recently found historical documents. The main contribution of this paper is to furnish fresh data about Firth’s biography with particular reference to the question of how he became interested in the science of language.
1937Isaac Pitman.A pioneer in the scientific study of language. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons.
Allen, W[illiam] S[idney]
1953Phonetics in Ancient India. London: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, Thomas
1882History of Shorthand; with a review of its present condition and prospects in Europe and America. London: Allen & Co.
Blunt, Edward
1937The I.C.S. Indian Civil Service. London: Faber & Faber.
Carnochan, Jack
1961 “John Rupert Firth”. Le Maître Phonetique No.115.2–3.
Collins, Beverley & Inger M. Mees
1999The Real Professor Higgins: The life and career of Daniel Jones. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Firth, J[ohn] R[upert]
1930Speech. (= Benn’s Sixpenny Library, 121.) London: Ernest Benn, 79 pp. (Repr. – together with Firth [1937] – as The Tongues of Men and Speech ed. by Peter Strevens, 139–211. London: Oxford University Press 1964.)
Firth, J. R.
1937The Tongues of Men. London: Watts & Co., vii1, 160 pp. (Repr., together with Firth 1930, in Firth 1964.1–138.)
Firth, J. R.
1946 “The English School of Phonetics”. Transactions of the Philological Society 1946.92–132. (Repr. in Firth 1957a.7–33.)
Firth, J. R.
1948 “Sounds and Prosodies”. Transactions of the Philological Society 1948.127–152. (Repr. in Firth 1957a.121–139.)
Firth, J. R.
1949 “Atlantic Linguistics”. Archivum Linguisticum 1:2.95–116. (Repr. in Firth 1957a.156–172.)
Firth, J. R.
1952Preliminary Reports for the Seventh Linguistic Congress, London 1952, pp. 5–9.
Firth, J. R.
1956 “Presidential Address”.Transactions of the Philological Society 1956.1–25. (Repr. in Firth 1968: 53–73.)
Firth, J. R.
1957aPapers in Linguistics 1934–51. London – New York – Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Firth, J. R.
1957b “Ethnographic Analysis andLanguage with Reference to Malinowski’s Views”. Man and Culture: An evaluation of the work of Bronislaw Malinowski ed. by Raymond W. Firth, 93–118. London: Oxford University Press. (Repr. in Firth 1968: 137–167.)
Firth, J. R.
1964The Tongues of Men and Speech. London: Oxford University Press. [Reprint of Firth 1937 and 1930; with a Preface by Peter Strevens, pp. vii–x.]
Firth, J. R.
1968Selected Papers of John Rupert Firth (1952–1959). Ed. by F. R. Palmer. London: Longman; Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Haas, William
1956–1958 “Of Living Things”. German Life and Letters 10:1.62–69; 111.85–96; 121.251–257.
2001 “R. H. Robins, J. R. Firth, andLinguistic Historiography”. Henry Sweet Society Bulletin 361.5–11.
Malinowski, Bronislaw
1923 “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Societies”. The Meaning of Meaning by C. K.Ogden & I. A. Richards, Supplement I1, 451–510. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mitchell, T[erence] F[rederik]
1957The Language of Buying and Selling in Cyrenaica: A situational statement. Hesperis. University of Rabat. (Repr. in Mitchell 1975: 167–201.)
Mitchell, T. F.
1975Principles of Firthian linguistics. London: Longman.
Pitman, Isaac
1891A History of Shorthand. 3rd ed. Bath: Phonetic Institute; London: Pitman & Sons.
Robins, R[obert] H[enry]
1951Ancient and Mediaeval grammatical theory in Europe; with particular reference to modern linguistic doctrine. London: Bell & Sons.
Robins, R. H.
1961 “John Rupert Firth”. Language 371.191–201.
Robins, R. H.
1971 “Malinowski, Firth and ‘The context of situation’”. Social Anthropology and Language (= Monographs of the Association of Social Anthropologists 10), 33–46. London: Tavistock.
Robins, R. H.
1997a “‘ Ask not for whom the bells tolls, it tolls for thee’: General linguistics, the history of linguistics, andthe responsibilities of language students”. Interview with Pierre Swiggers. Orbis 391.181–207.
Robins, R. H.
1997b “The Contribution of J. R. Firth to the first fifty years of Lingua”. Lingua 1001.205–222. (Repr. in Selected Papers on the History of Linguistics: Texts and contexts
by R. H. Robins, ed. by Vivien Law, 286–310. Münster: Nodus 1998.)
Scott, N[orman] C[arson]
1961 “John Rupert Firth”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 241.413–418.
Sweet, Henry
1892A Manual of Current Shorthand, orthographic and phonetic. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
1979Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Original German text and English translation by A. C. Miles, revised by Rush Rhees. Retford: The Brymill Press.
Cited by
Cited by 5 other publications
Coleman, John
2006. ‘The Phonetic Structure of a Cypriotic Dialect’: A Rediscovered Paper by J. R. Firth1. Transactions of the Philological Society 104:3 ► pp. 297 ff.
Léon, Jacqueline
2008. Aux sources de la « Corpus Linguistics » : Firth et la London School. Langages n° 171:3 ► pp. 12 ff.
2008. J. R. Firth: a new biography1. Transactions of the Philological Society 106:3 ► pp. 337 ff.
Stanlaw, James
2020. Firth, John Rupert. In The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, ► pp. 1 ff.
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