International Journal of Applied Linguistics w Vol. 17w No. 3w2007
‘Classic Book’ Review
This feature provides a critical reappraisal of a well-known book that was published some time ago in order to ass how far it is still relevant to current thinking.
J.R. Firth, 1957, Papers in Linguistics 1934–51
Henry Widdowson University of Vienna
When the papers were published in 1957, the status and prestige of J.R. Firth as the father of British linguistics and its most influential theorist emed cure. Colleagues and students were almost reverential in their deference to his authority. One might have suppod that this book, a collection of almost all of his publications, and the only written record of his thinking over twenty-five years and more, would have rved to confirm his predominance and provide the esntial source of reference for the subquent development of his ideas.
But 1957 was also the year of publication of a book by another linguist, Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, reviewed in InJAL 17.1 (V. Cook 2007), and it was this, not Firth’s volume, that was to be th
地址 英文e dominant influence on future developments in mainstream linguistics in the following decades. So 1957 can be said to mark the beginning of the confrontation of opposing approaches to the study of language – the Chomskyan formalist, the Firthian functionalist – and though the latter still had its adherents and retained some influence, it was the formalist that found increasing favour in the subquent years.
The two books are in striking contrast with each other, too, in the manner in which the alternative positions are prented. Chomsky’s book takes the form of a coherent, if complex, argument for radical change and reprents a manifesto for a new conceptual order. Firth’s book, on the other hand, is a collection of thematically diver papers arranged in chronological order of publication recording the history of his scholarship, but with no explicit coherent connection between them at all. It is indeed a motley collection. Very general reflections about phonetics mingle with particular accounts of the phonological features of certain Indian languages and, even more specifically, the description of the structure of the Chine monosyllable in a Hunane dialect. Between papers like “The mantics of linguistic science”and “Personality and language in society”, which promi to reveal something
美国读者文摘‘Classic Book’ Review w403 of general theoretical significance, we have technical notes on “Word-p
alatograms and articulation” and “Improved techniques in palatography and kymography”, which do not. How the papers together constitute a linguistic theory is left for readers to discover for themlves. Firth himlf suggests that they might u the Index of his book for this purpo. In his introduction he remarks: “In the lected papers, which have appeared over a period of twenty-five years, a developing linguistic theory is prented, as may be apparent from the entries in the Index” (p. xi). Just how readers are to construct the developing linguistic theory by consulting the Index is, however, not made apparent. What is apparent is that with the Index as the only guide, it is difficult to establish just what this theory actually is.
Readers of the papers, then, are left to work out the theory for themlves by following whatever clues they can find in the Index. Elwhere Firth is rather more considerate of his reader: in a paper promisingly entitled “A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930–55”, he does provide his own summary account. This was also published in 1957, but parately in a special volume of the Philological Society, Studies in Linguistic Analysis, and subquently reprinted in Palmer 1968. How far its inclusion in the book under review would have provided the necessary guidance to readers in their understanding of Firthian thinking is, however, open to some doubt. Although it is the most complete and authoritative account we have, Palmer describes it as “a most disappointing paper”:
It is less easy to read than many of his other articles and although Firth assured me on one occasion that he had carefully weighed every single ntence in it, it looks today even less coherent and consistent than de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. (Palmer 1968: 4)
The fact that Firth’s theory ems to have eluded even his own attempts at elucidation naturally gives ri to the suspicion that there might not actually be any coherent and consistent theory to elucidate. It is not surprising, therefore, that John L yons was prompted to comment (though perhaps surprisingly in the volume In Memory of J.R. Firth): “there are tho who would deny that Firth ever developed anything systematic enough to be described as a theory” (L yons 1966: 607). Even linguists well dispod to Firth, including colleagues who would not have had to depend only on the evidence of his writing, em not to have been entirely clear about the theory they inherited from him. Palmer, for example, makes the comment:“Firth was, as is well known, misunderstood and largely ignored by almost all his contemporaries except tho in his immediate circle, and alas, he was misunderstood by some of the too” (Palmer 1968: 2). Even that most celebrated of neo-Firthians, Michael Halliday, was apparently mistaken in claiming that his model of grammar derived from Firth: according to Palmer, the two approaches to linguistic description have “little in common” (Palmer 1968: 8–9).烫印
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Given that the theory suppodly reprented in Papers in Linguistics is so elusive of description, and apparently so susceptible to variable interpretation, even by tho most cloly acquainted with it, it is not to be wondered at that it succumbed to the invading force of a new theory, so explicitly propounded by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures.
But for all that, it is the content of Firth’s book that in many ways has more sturdily stood the test of time and makes the more lasting contribution to linguistic thinking. Not only did many of his ideas anticipate later developments and the restoration of a more humanistic and socially oriented approach to the study of language, but, more importantly, his very failure to bring the ideas within the confines of an integrated theory rais crucial issues about the nature and scope of linguistic theory itlf which remain unresolved to this day, and which have a direct bearing on applied linguistic concerns.
Perhaps the clearest indications of Firth’s way of thinking are to be found in one of the later papers in this collection, “Personality and language in society”, first published in 1950. Here he states quite explicitly that for him linguistics is esntially the study of “linguistic events in the social process”(p. 1
81), and as such it is directly oppod to what he calls the “structural formalism” of Saussure which reduced language to “a system of signs placed in categories” (p. 180). It is oppod too, of cour, to the structural formalism of generative linguistics, which, for all its novelty of formulation, is informed by the same reductionist principles. Chomsky indeed explicitly acknowledges that his approach is traditional in that it adopts “the position of the founders of modern general linguistics”, and he adds “and no cogent reason for modifying it has been offered” (Chomsky 1965: 3–4). The reason that Firth offers is that such an approach, in defining language in terms of abstract systems, misreprents reality. “Actual people do not talk such a language”, he says.“However systematically you talk, you do not talk systematics” (p. 180). This would appear to be a fairly cogent reason – certainly cogent enough for Labov to adduce some fifteen years later:
it is difficult to avoid the common-n conclusion that the object of linguistics must ultimately be the instrument of communication ud by the speech community; and if we are not talking about that language, there is something trivial in our proceeding. (Labov 1972: 187)
Firth would have heartily agreed. For him, as for L abov, “the study of language in its social context” is what linguistics should be all about. When Firth said so in 1957, nobody emed to have paid much attention. When Labov said so, after a decade or so during which the “trivial proceeding” of for
malist linguistics had been dominant, it struck a dissident, even revolutionary note and was taken to be a radical change of approach. In the early 1970s, circumstances had become favourable for the emergence of the kind of linguistics that Firth had spent a lifetime proposing. But by then he had been
‘Classic Book’ Review w405 dead for over ten years and his work apparently forgotten, if it was ever known at all. Labov makes no reference to it.
For Firth, then, as for Labov, linguistics is esntially the study of language in its social context. And it is the concept of context that he propos as providing the central unifying principle of his theory. Perhaps the best known notion that has survived from this collection of papers is that of the context of situation. As Firth acknowledges, the phra is taken over from Malinowski, but he gives it a somewhat different meaning. Whereas Malinowski thinks of it as an actually occurring state of affairs, “an ordered ries of events considered as in rebus” (p. 182), Firth conceives of it in more abstract terms:
My view was, and still is, that ‘context of situation’ is best ud as a suitable schematic construct to apply to language events, and that it is a group of related categories at a different level from gramma
tical categories but rather of the same abstract nature. A context of situation for linguistic work brings into relation the following categories:
A.The relevant features of participants: persons, personalities.
goldmine(i)The verbal action of the participants.
turmoil(ii)The non-verbal action of the participants.
B.The relevant objects.
C.The effect of the verbal action. (p. 182)
Firth’s concern for the description of ‘language events’ anticipates Hymes’discussion of ‘speech events’ in his paper “The ethnography of speaking”, first published ven years later in 1962 (and reprinted in Fishman 1968). Hymes’ description of factors in the speech event and their corresponding functions can be said to be a more specific formulation of the ‘features’ that Firth refers to here. Hymes does not e it in this way, however. He reprents his description as a development of the ideas of Jakobson (1960), and Firth is only given a nod of recognition in passing. One can e why. Jakobson’s schematic construct is a model of coherence compared with Firth’s, a
nd much easier to interpret and to apply.
For it has to be said that although Firth prefigures future developments, his schematic construct does not give us much to go on. The specification of categories clearly depends on which features are to be identified as relevant and which are not, and Firth gives no indication of how this might be determined. In applying this schema, how do we know which features in the situation to disregard as simply contingent and which to take as typical of the category? How do we know what a particular language event is an example of. With the crucial condition of relevance left in conceptual limbo, it is hard to e how this construct can be put to procedural u. For all that, the kind of programme that Firth was proposing was remarkably innovative at the time and a precursor of future enquiry. What he was trying to get at was a t of contextual factors that act upon linguistic forms to give them
新视野大学英语3406w Henry Widdowson
校长竞聘演讲稿their communicative significance. In doing so he anticipated not only the study of language in its social context in general, but developments in pragmatics, in particular as related to speech act theory (Searle 1969).
What speech act theory does is to take up this issue of relevance. The features that Firth refers to be
卡玛拉哈里斯come relevant as realizations of conditions on speech acts, which can themlves be identified as particular configurations of speech act factors as described by Hymes. Thus we process what is said, and who says it in the light of our social knowledge of what counts as particular acts of communication. We regulate our attention to attend only to tho features of the participants and their actions that lead us to determine what propositional and illocutionary acts they are performing. What features of the language event are relevant in a particular ca are tho factors in the speech event which are assigned significance as actualizations of abstract speech act conditions. And what Firth refers to as “the effect of the verbal action” is precily the third kind of pragmatic meaning that Searle discuss, namely its perlocutionary effect.
There are indications that Firth himlf thought at times along speech act lines, or at least in terms of speech functions rather than the situations in which they typically occur. In his paper “The technique of mantics”, written in 1935, fifteen years earlier than “Personality and language in society”, having anticipated his later paper by arguing the need for “the adequate description and classification of contexts of situation” (p. 28), he goes on to concede that “[i]t is perhaps easier to suggest types of linguistic function than to classify situations”, and then provides a list of such functions in a passage that could have been written by Hymes himlf, and which might indeed rve as the programmatic
agenda for current work in pragmatics: Such would be, for instance, the language of agreement, encouragement, endorment, of disagreement and condemnation. As language is a way of dealing with people and things, a way of behaving and of making others behave, we could add many types of function – wishing, blessing, cursing, boasting, the language of challenge and appeal, or with intent to cold-shoulder, to belittle, to annoy or hurt, even to a declaration of enmity. The u of words to inhibit hostile action, or to delay or modify it, or conceal one’s intention are very interesting and important ‘meanings’.
aestheticismNor must we forget the language of social flattery and love-making, of prai and blame, of propaganda and persuasion. (p. 31)
While recognising that it is easier to classify functions, Firth, somewhat perverly one might think, preferred not to do so but to attempt the more difficult task of classifying situations instead. The result, as we have noted, is far from satisfactory. Nevertheless, his ‘schematic construct’ can be en as a rough and provisional draft for a pragmatic account of language, and the subquent and more explicit enquiry into speech acts and functions, one might suggest, took up where he left off.
