John Rupert Firth?s Model of Linguistics: A Critical Study

Abstract

The attempt was made to clarify Firth’s main interests in linguistics. His writings show that the study of ‘Meaning’ and ‘Context’ should be central in linguistics, in addition to the development of a model called ‘Prosodic Analysis’, where he laid out his views as to how language works and how linguists should approach its analysis. For Firth, the analysis of language comes within the range of a social theory. A general linguistic theory should then study language as a social behavior, and context within the context of culture. Firth also advocated the investigation of corpora of written texts, which can be strategically selected to exemplify a restricted language.