John Rupert Firth: Word

“In English we have noticed twenty-five consonant and about twenty vowel phonemes. Although individual pronunciations may differ, the phonemic habits of the same group or class will be similar. They will make similar use of heterophony. Words not phonetically separated — that is, homophones — may be separated by function or by experiential context”

John Rupert Firth

Source: Speech, 1930, p. 182

“It is not easy to determine what are the units of speech. Some would say speech sounds, others phonemes… The general opinion is, however, that words, not phones or phonemes or phoneme systems, are the units of speech.”

John Rupert Firth

Source: Speech, 1930, p. 182-183; As cited in: Angela Senis (2016: 293)

“Research into the detailed contextual distribution of sociologically important words, what one might call focal or pivotal words, is only just beginning.”

John Rupert Firth

1957, p. 10
"The Technique of Semantics." 1935

“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.”

John Rupert Firth

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.

“Speech is our most valuable instrument, because we can make it fit our common lives. We are not born to follow words. Words follow life. It has always been so from the very beginning. In fact, the human larynx and the shape of the passages above it have evolved in harmony with the lives our earliest ancestors lived, first in the trees, and then on the ground.”

John Rupert Firth

Source: The tongues of men. 1937, p. 25 (1968; 24)

Life , Tree

“The complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from context can be taken seriously.”

John Rupert Firth

Source: "The Technique of Semantics." 1935, p. 37

Study

“The study of such words as work, labour, trade, employ, occupy, play, leisure, time, hours, means, self-respect, in all their derivatives and compounds in sociologically significant contexts during the last twenty years would be quite enlightening. So would the study of words particularly associated with the dress, occupations, and ambitions of women, or the language of advertising, especially of quackery, entertainments, food, drink, or of political movements and propaganda.”

John Rupert Firth

1957, p. 13
"The Technique of Semantics." 1935

Women , Food , Drink , Study

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

John Rupert Firth

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