¢A Firthian phonologycal analysis recognizes a number of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units.
¢The terminological distinction between ‘prosodies’ and ‘phonematic units’ could as well be thought of as ‘prosodies’ that happen to be only one segment long.
¢In Firthian terms the syllable plays an essential role as the domain of a large number of prosodies.
¢Like the polysystemic principle, prosodic analysis is a good dissolvent of pseudoquestions, in this case questions about the direction of dependencies which are in fact mutual.
¢The concept of the prosodic unit in phonology seems, so attractive and natural that it is surprising to find that it is not more widespread. In fact just one American Descriptivists, Zellig Harris, did use a similar notion; but Harris’s ‘long components’ though similar to Firth’s prosodies, are distinct and theoretically less attractive.
¢It is a characteristic of the Firthian approach to be much more concerned with the ‘systems’ of choices between alternatives which occur in a language than with the details of how particular alternatives are realized.
Thus Henderson makes a formal statement of the possible combinations of her Vietnamese prosodies, but she discusses the phonetic realization of the prosodies informally, tacitly suggesting that aspect of her exposition is not part of the analysis proper.
Nowhere in Chomsky and Halle’s Sound pattern of English will one find a statement of the pattern of possible phonological shapes of English syllables or words.
¢Firth insisted that sound and meaning in language were more directly related that they are ussually taken to be.
¢For Firth, a phonology was a structure of system of choices were systems of meaning.
¢Firth meant that each individual choice point in grammar had its own individual semantic correlates, and this just cannot be taken seriously.
¢Linguistics of the London School have done much more work on the analysis of intonation that have Americans of any camp and the Brithis work.
¢To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we muste exmine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski, professor of Anthropology at the London School.
¢The most important aspect of Malinowski´s theorizing, as distinct for his purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language.
¢For Malinowski, to think of language as a ‘means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener’ was a myth: to speak, particulary in a primitive culture, is not to tell but to do.
¢Word are tools, and the ‘meaning’ of a tool is its use.
¢Firth accepted Malinowski’s viwe of language. Firth uses the word ‘meaning’, wich occurs frequently in his writings, in rather bizarre ways.
¢Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentencesthat one’s language makes available.
¢To make this clearer, we may contrast the systemic approach with Chomsky´s approach to grammar. A Chomskyan grammar defines the class of well-formed senteces in a language by providing a set of rules for rewriting symbols as other symbols.
