J.R.Firth

Contextual Theory and Prosodic Phonology

Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski spent most of his life in England and found prominence there in the field of anthropology. Much of his work was in the South Seas and it was there, working with the Trobriand Islanders, that his interest in linguistic problems was aroused. He found that it was impossible for him to give a word-for-word translation of many expressions these people used, especially in connection with their religion. He found this lack of word-for-word correspondence true, in varying degrees, of all of their important cultural expression. In trying to work out this problem he found himself almost unwittingly forming a theory of meaning and language.

“Context of situation” is the expression that sums up Malinowski’s basic insight into how the meanings of language should be stated. It was this idea that Firth took up and developed. This view is not unlike the behavioristic formula, since it claims that the meaning of any utterance is what it does in some context of situation. This is readily translated into the “practical events which follow,” a linguistic utterance in Bloomfield’s system. Behaviorism, a scientific fad in the United States during the 1930s, never caused much more than a ripple of amusement in Europe, so that Malinowski’s work is not simply to be equated with the behavioristic approach. It does bear out Bloomfield’s contention. Though, that mechanists and mentalist use the same practical methods for the statement of meanings.

MEANING=USE

One advantage that J.R Firth saw in this approach is that it appears to escape the “entanglements of referential meaning” theories. In this system any utterance could stand for anything whatever without causing problems for the analyst, since his statement of meaning will be in terms of environmental effect. More than that an expression thus described need not stand for anything. In fact, a great range of language use cannot be sensibly explained in terms of referential meaning, according to Malinowski

Phatic Communion

“Phatic communion” is a term that Malinowski invented to label no referential uses of language. But one might object that any such “escape” from referential problems is only through the mediation of speaker’s understanding, hopes, desires, and so on

Malinowski had answers to these anticipated objections

1.      Speaker’s desires, intentions, knowledge, and so on do indeed contribute to the context of situation, but this admission does not require him to return to the traditional methods of explaining what they are: he need merely recognize that they are pertinent factors.

2.      There is a great difference between literary and familiar use of language. Literary language is deliberately composed for a wide context, a specific task, and then it is meant to be forgotten. It is bound up with, and only fully understandable in each context of situation. As for a third objection, Malinowski had an ingenious answer and an appealing expression.

Translation

Since societies are unique, and their languages and the situations in which they use languages are equally unique, it would appear that translation would be impossible. This was partially Malinowski’s view, especially in the situations most peculiar to each community. The difficulty he felt, is not so great among Europeans, who more or less share the same culture, but the gap between them and the Trobrianders makes the problem acute

The reasons for this are expressed in terms much like the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, which for two different cultures “an entirely different world of things to be expressed” exists. Language is essentially pragmatic in Malinowski’s view, so that it can be described as a set of symbols for things (lexical items) arranged in a set of relations as men see them (grammar) and men “see” them according to their power to act upon them. Meaning, therefore, is “the effect of words on human minds and bodies, and through these on these environmental reality as created or conceived in a given culture”

Firth’s Conception of Linguistics

Older views of linguistics have been based on a discredited dualism of some psychophysical kind. American linguistics has followed the behavioristic doctrines of Watson, which amounts to another kind of realistic presupposition that Firth thought unnecessary. Malinowski as opposed to what “has no existence” except in the mind of the linguistics.

In Firth’s view such questions are beside stepped since the success of any scientific theory in renewal of connection with the experiential facts to which it must constantly refer is the best norm or preferring one theory over another. Firth thought that question of “reality” can paralyze inquiry , he asked, “  Where would mechanics be if it were to use as its point of departure an explanation of “What mention really is?”

Terminology

He noted in “Synopsis of Linguistic Theory” that structured is, therefore, concerned with syntagmatic relations between elements and system concerns paradigmatic relations between commutable units or terms that provide values for elements.

System and structures are studied on various levels of analysis in context of situation for statements of meaning. A context of situation is a schematic construct that is applied especially to repetitive events in the social process, consisting of various levels of analysis. These levels, for example, phonetic, phonological, grammatical, lexical, situational are equally theoretical constructs and they consist of a consistent frame work of categories, which are named in a restricted language in order to deal with the distinguishable aspects of meanings of . Since “meaning  is use”. Situations are set up especially to recognize use. Two such distinguishable aspects of meaning are found in collocation and colligation. On the lexical level one finds certain words in habitual company with other words and his accompaniment contributes to their meaning. This is not merely context in the usual sense, or meaning through the examples lexicographers give, having established a meaning outside those context, it is an order of mutual expectancy between actual lexical items.

Contextual Analysis

The situational approach requires that we analyze the typical speech situation as follows :

1.      Interior relations of the text itself

·         Syntagmatic relations between elements of structure considered at the various levels of analysis

·         Paradigmatic relations of terms or units that commute within systems to give values to the elements of structure.

2.      Interior relations within the context of situation

·         The text in relation to the nonverbal constituents, with its total effective or creative results

·         Analytic relations between “bits” and “pieces” of the text, and special constituents within the situation.

The first level is that of phonetics, as discussed here, although the “levels” are not hierarchical in any ontological sense and the direction of the analysis is not necessarily from phonetics to situations. This level includes what American linguists would distinguish as the levels of phonetic and phonemics or phonology. But we can retain the term, since both phonetic and phonological levels are “levels of meaning” for Firth’s, a fact often asserted by him in statements like “it is part of the meaning of a Frenchman to sound like a Frenchman” At this level, sounds have function by virtue of (1) the places in which they occur and (2) the contrast they show with other sounds that could occur in the same place.

Prosodic Analysis

All linguistics seems to be in agreement that the study of language should be “formal” in the sense that linguistics units and categories should be verifiable trough compositional or distributional contrast or both. They are less agreed about (1) the fundamental units to be included in such description;(2) the direction in which such descriptions should proceed – from sound to sentence or sentence to sound (3) the relevance and nature of meaning to be used in establishing the units; (4) the number of levels of analysis required and (5) the extent to which information, from one levels is relevant to setting up units on another.

In Analyzing the phonic material of an utterance, prosodic analysis distinguishes as at levels, between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. The items in paradigmatic relations are systematic, while those in syntagmatic relations are structural. As indicated by de Saussure, there must be a successive phonematic units, which can be studied as elements in structure. A typical structural element is a syllable, and the syllable structure of any word or piece is considered prosodic. While Firth did not seem to give a clear definition of prosody, the illustrations he gave include features of stress, length, nasality, palatalization, lotization, labiovelarization, and aspiration.

Monosystemic vs Polysystemic Analysis

Firth and the London school had two principal objections to American structuralism. The objections concern American phonological procedures, but they have evident implications for the rest of language study as well. According to the Bloomfieldian view, phonemics is based on a single system of language, an assumption that goes counter to Firth’s conception of linguistic structure, and this issue introduces anomalies such as the concept of redundancy. Firth did not believe that the analysis of discourse could be developed from phonemic procedures, nor even by analogy from them.

The objection to inability to “make renewal of connection” with phonetic reality was not a complaint about inadequate transcription and Firth’s own approach to phonology was quite evidently not intended to supply a new or better method of transcription. In fact, he believed that phonemics suffered precisely from its preoccupation with transcription that phonemics could, therefore, be termed “prelingustics” in much the same sense as phonetics, and the phoneme would be better called a “transcribeme”

Redundancy

The prosodists deny that is the same kind of information which their system provides. Robins distinguished prosodies from suprasegmental phonemes, since the latter represent quantitative features such as pitch, stress, and length, while the prosodies are concerned with qualitative features such as nasality, palatalization, and so on. Prosodies differ from Harris’ phoneme long components because, according to Robin, “abstraction of a component from a phoneme in one environment implies its abstraction from that phoneme in all other environment.”