John Rupert Firth
John Rupert Firth (June 17, 1890 in Keighley, Yorkshire – December 14, 1960 in Lindfield, West Sussex), commonly known as J. R. Firth, was an English linguist and a leading figure in British linguistics during the 1950s. He was Professor of English at the University of the Punjab from 1919–1928. He then worked in the phonetics department of University College London before moving to the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he became Professor of General Linguistics, a position he held until his retirement in 1956. Wartime service. In July 1941, before the outbreak of war with  Japan, Firth attended a conference on the training of Japanese interpreters and translators and began to think of how crash courses might be devised. By the summer of 1942 he had devised a method of training people rapidly in how to eavesdrop on Japanese conversations (for example, between pilots and ground control) and to interpret what they heard. The first course began on 12 October 1942 and was for RAF personnel. He had used captured Japanese code books and other such material to draw up a list of essential military vocabulary and had arranged for two Japanese teachers at SOAS  (one had been interned on the Isle of Man but had volunteered to teach, while the other was a Canadian-Japanese) to record sentences in which these words might be used. Trainees listened through headphones to recordings containing expressions such as 'Bakugeki junbi taikei tsukure' (Take up formation for bombing). At the end of each course he sent a report to Bletchley Park commenting on the abilities of each trainee. The trainees were mostly posted to India and played a vital role during the long Burma Campaign giving warning of bombing raids, and a few of them were undertaking similar  duties on ships of the Royal Navy during the last year of the war. For his work during the war he was awarded an OBE in 1945. Contributions to linguistics. His work on prosody, which he emphasised at the expense of the phonemic principle, prefigured later work in autosegmental phonology. Firth is noted for drawing attention to the context-dependent nature of meaning with his notion of 'context of situation', and his work on collocational meaning is widely acknowledged in the field of distributional semantics. In particular, he is known for the famous quotation: Firth developed a particular view of  linguistics that has given rise to the adjective 'Firthian'. Central to this view is the idea of "polysystematism". David Crystal describes this as: His approach can be considered as resuming that of Malinowski's anthropological semantics, and as a precursor of the approach of semiotic anthropology. Anthropological approaches to semantics are alternative to the three major types of semantics approaches: linguistic semantics, logical semantics, and General semantics. Other independent approaches to semantics are philosophical semantics and psychological semantics. The 'London School'. As a teacher in the University of London for more than 20 years, Firth influenced a generation of British  linguists. The popularity of his ideas among contemporaries gave rise to what was known as the 'London School' of linguistics. Among Firth's students, the so-called neo-Firthians were exemplified by Michael Halliday, who was Professor of General Linguistics in the University of London from 1965 until 1971. Firth encouraged a number of his students, who later became well known linguists, to carry out research on a number of African and Oriental languages. T. F. Mitchell worked on Arabic and Berber, Frank R. Palmer on Ethiopian languages, including Tigre, and Michael Halliday on Chinese. Some other students whose native  tongues were not English also worked with him and that enriched Firth's theory on prosodic analysis. Among his influential students were the Arab linguists Ibrahim Anis, Tammam Hassan and Kamal Bashir . Firth got many insights from work done by his students in Semitic and Oriental languages so he made a great departure from the linear analysis of phonology and morphology to a more of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, where it is important to distinguish between the two levels of phonematic units (equivalent to phone) and prosodies (equivalent to features like "nasalization", "velarization" etc.). Prosodic analysis paved the way to  autosegmental phonology, though many linguists, who do not have a good background on the history of phonology, do not acknowledge this.