J. R. Firthの学説

特に“context of situation”と“prosodic analysis”について

抄録

As R. H. Robins aptly says in his obituary article, the death of J. R. Firth, which occurred on 14 December, 1960, marks the end of an era in the study oflinguistics in Britain.
J. R. Firth, M. A., LL. D.(Edin.), O. B. E., (1980-1960), was Professor of General Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University ofLondon, from 1944 to 1956, and was President of the Philological Society from 1954 to 1957.
Firth, while regarding himself as a traditionalist, paying a high tribute to the scholars of the past and demanding full recognitions of their contributionsto linguistic science, developed a very original outlook on language and linguisticscience, and thus came to be known as the leader of the London group of linguists.
The contributions he made to linguistic science are many, but the twodevelopments particularly associated with his name are the theory of ‘context of situation’ and prosodic analysis.
Firth insisted that the statement of meaning was the greatest concern of descriptive linguistics. He rejected the dichotomy which splits language into‘content’ and ‘expression, ’ and proposed that a linguistic event should be takenin its entirety and analyzed at a number of different levels, situational, collocational, syntactical, phonological and phonetic, the meaning of the event beingthus stated at each level. He insisted that what is conventionally regarded asmeaning would be best dealt with when analyzed in terms of ‘context of situation’in which the linguistic event in question is embedded. Thus he emphasizedthe necessity of the study of persons and personalities as part of the situation.
He took over the notion of ‘context of situation’ first proposed by thenoted anthropologist, Malinowski, with whom he co-operated, and developed itas a schematic construct imposed by the linguist upon the material in makingstatements of meaning.
True to the tradition of the British school of linguists, he was also an excellentphonetician. He was particularly concerned with the phonological featuresaffecting stretches larger than ‘segments, ’ and treated them as belonging to anorder different from that of ‘phonematic' units which are conventionally calledconsonants and vowels. He called these features ‘prosodies.’ Pitch, stress, length, aspiration, etc. may fall under the category of prosody, ’ but prosodies vary fromlanguage to language according to the structural patterning of languages. Hebelieved that the phonic data presented before the analyst is most exhaustivelyand aptly dealt with by prosodic analysis.
His proposals and suggestions, though most stimulating and illuminating, were not always worked out in detail, so that his writings are not always easto follow for those who never came in close contact with him. But the numerousworks of his colleagues and followers will elucidate the main points of his theory.