The London School

• England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an unusually long history.
• Linguistic description becomes a matter of practical importance to a nation when it evolves a standard or 'official' language for itself out of the welter of diverse and conflicting local usages normally found in any territory that has been settled for a considerable time, and it happens that in this respect England was, briefly, far in advance of Europe.
• Sweet´s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones, who took the subject up as a hobby, suggested to the authorities of University College, London, that they ought to consider teaching the phonetics of french, was taken on as a lecturer there in 1907 and built up what became the first university department of phonetics in Britain.
• Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech-sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels.

• Thanks to the traditions established by sweet and Jones, the 'ear-training' aspect of phonetics plays a large part in University courses in linguistics in Britain, and British linguistic research tends to be informed by meticulous attention to phonetic detail.
• The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain was J. R. Firth.
• Firth argues, that phonemicists are led into error by the nature of European writing systems.
• Another respect in which Firth felt that phonemic analysis was unduly influenced by alphabetic writing was with respect to the segmental principle.
• A Firthian phonological analysis 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 that represent whatever information is left when all the co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies.
• The final point worth mentioning about Firthian phonology, however, is much less easy to defend. firth insisted that sound and meaning in language were more directly related than they are usually taken to be.
• He seemed reluctant even to regard expression and content as distinct sides of the same coin, in the Saussurean way, and he was wholly unwilling to acknowledge the indirectness of the expression/content relationship suggested by Martinet´s slogan about 'double articulation'.
• For Firth, a phonology was a structure of systems of choices, and systems of choices were systems of meaning.