John rupert firth biography channel

John Rupert Firth (June 17, 1890 in Keighley, Yorkshire – December 14, 1960 in Lindfield, West Sussex), commonly known as J.

John rupert firth biography channel

R. Firth, was an English linguist and a leading figure in British linguistics during the 1950s.^[1] 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.^[2]

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