The London school

J.R. Firth (1890-1960)

žHe became the first professor of General Linguistics in Great Britian.

žHe taught courses on the sociology of languange in 1930.

žOne of the principal features of Fith´s treatment of phonology is that it is polysystemic.

žFor him the phonology of a languange consits of a number of systems of alternative possibilities which come into play a different points in a phonological unit such as a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.

A firthian phonological analysis recognizes a number of “systems of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determines the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment –sized phonematic units that represent whatever information is left when all the co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies