John Rupert Firth Quotes
1890–1960 England
John Rupert Firth (June 17, 1890 in Keighley, Yorkshire – December 14, 1960 in Lindfield, West Sussex), commonly known as J. R.
Random John Rupert Firth quote
9 quotes
The complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from context can be taken seriously.
A western scholar must de-europeanize himself, and, in view of the most universal use of English, an Englishman must de-Anglicize himself as well.
J. R. Firth (1956)
The phonetic animal par excellence is man. All men are born with an infinite capacity for making noises and using them.
Research into the detailed contextual distribution of sociologically important words, what one might call focal or pivotal words, is only just beginning.
You shall know a word by the company it keeps.
Meaning... is to be regarded as a complex of contextual relations, and phonetics, grammar, lexicography, and semantics each handles its own components of the complex in its appropriate context.
Strictly speaking, the grammatical method of resolving a sentence into parts is nothing but a fanciful procedure ; but it is the real fountain of all knowledge, since it led to the invention of writing.
p. 15; As cited in: Angela Senis (2016)
It is not easy to determine what are the units of speech. Some would say speech sounds, others phonemes... The general opinion is, however, that words, not phones or phonemes or phoneme systems, are the units of speech.
The various structures of sentences in any given language, comprising for example at least two nominal pieces and a verbal piece must be collated, and such categories as voice, mood, affirmative, negative, tense, aspect, gender, number, person and case, if found applicable and valid in descriptive statement, are to be abstracted from, and referred back to the sentence as a whole.