John Rupert Firth Quotes

John Rupert Firth , 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. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. June 1890 – 14. December 1960
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John Rupert Firth: 14   quotes 0   likes

Famous John Rupert Firth Quotes

“The phonetic animal par excellence is man. All men are born with an infinite capacity for making noises and using them.”

1964, p. 141; Chapter 1; Chapter 1: The Origin of Speech
Speech, 1930

“A western scholar must de-europeanize himself, and, in view of the most universal use of English, an Englishman must de-Anglicize himself as well.”

J. R. Firth, (1956). "Descriptive linguistics and the study of english." in: F.R. Palmer (ed.), Selected Papers of J.R. Firth, Indiana University Press, p. 96; As cited in: Angela Senis (2016)

“Collocations are actual words in habitual company. A word in a usual collocation stares you in the face just as it is. Colligations cannot be of words as such. Colligations of grammatical categories related in a grammatical structure do not necessarily follow word divisions or even sub-divisions of words.”

Firth (1962, p. 14), as cited in Wendy J. Anderson, A corpus linguistic analysis of phraseology and collocation in the register of current European Union administrative French. Diss. University of St Andrews, 2003.

John Rupert Firth Quotes

“You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”

Cited in: [Kenneth Church, 2007, A Pendulum Swung too Far, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ldc/swung-too-far.pdf, Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 6, 4, 5]
"A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955." 1957

“Strictly speaking, the grammatical method of resolving a sentence into parts is nothing but a fanciful procedure; but it is the real fountain of all knowledge, since it led to the invention of writing.”

Source: The tongues of men. 1937, p. 15; As cited in: Angela Senis (2016) , " The contribution of John Rupert Firth to the history of linguistics and the rejection of the phoneme theory http://media.leidenuniv.nl/legacy/014-senis.pdf." Proceedings of ConSOLE XXIII 273.

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