European Structuralism

2.2. London School

The London School of Linguistics, along with phonology, focuses more on the semantic aspect of language. Not to mention that it too follows Saussure’s path of synchrony. It “rejects the concepts of the speech collective and social experience and studies the speech of the individual person” (encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com). The key figures of this school are Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, J.R. Firth, Michael Halliday, and R.A. Hudson. The London School of Linguistics has a major role to play to establish linguistics as an academic discipline.

J.R. Firth is an important name in The London School of Linguistics as he contributed to the phonology with his theory of prosodic analysis and to semantics by adopting and developing ideas of Polish anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) into a contextual theory of meaning. This idea later on inspired Halliday to develop his theory of “systemic functional grammar”. This concerns the nature and import of the various choices one makes to utter one particular sentence out of infinitely numerous sentences available in a language. This idea led to developing a taxonomy for sentences.