THE LONDON SCHOOL

England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an usually long history. Lingustic description becomes a matter of practical importance to a nation when  it envolves 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. 

Elsewhere, the cultural dominance of Latin together with the supranational mediaval world-view made contemporary languages seem to be mere vulgar local vernaculars unworthy of serious study; but England was already develping a recognized standard language by the eleventh century

Firth argue, correctly in my view, that phonemicits are led into error by the nature of European writing systems. A phonemic transcription, after all represents a fully consistent application of the particular principles of orthography on which European alphabetic scripts happen to be more or less accurately based. 

The concept of the prosodic unit in phonology seems so attractive and natural that it is suprising to find that it is not more widespread. The generative phonologists seem to have been so intent on arguin for the "horizontal" division of a stretch of speech-sound into distinctive features (as against those Descriptivists who thought of phonemes as indivisible atoms) that they have never thought to call into question the "vertical" division into segments.

To understand Firth's notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942). Professor of Antrophology at the London School of Economics from 1927 onwards. For Malinowski, to think on languages as a "means of tranfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener" was a misleading myth to speak, partivulary in a primitive culture, is no to tell but to do.