Firthian linguistics

Jan-Ola Östman & Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen
Table of contents

‘Firthian linguistics’ gets its name from John Rupert Firth (1890–1960), the main proponent of an approach to language which was developed at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. (Cf. Firth 1930, 1934, 1937, 1957a, 1957b, 1968). The views of this London group of linguists differed on a number of important points both from those held by the American post-Bloomfieldians and from those of the European Saussureans, and they became so influential in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s that the approach is also often referred to as the ‘British school’ of linguistics.

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