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10 Malinowski and Firth

10.00 Bloomfield and Sapir were agreed that linguistic study ofSpeechuncovers the form ofLanguage. In quite different senses, both could be saidto consider that study oflanguage reveals a determinant of the form ofmind.Sapir devoted comparatively more attention to the interdependence of

Language and Culture. More than Sapir, Bloomfield found linguistic formdefinable in positive physical terms, negatively in behavioral or psychologicalones. Since mental structures were as physical for Bloomfield as thingsoutside, he faulted Sapir's conceptual account of speakers' 'insides'. Thoseinsides cannot be autonomous. They simply must be subject to the same laws

as those outside a head, though more difficult to observe. Yet his brief reviewof Sapir'sLanguage conceded that there was no other way of talking aboutsuch things to a general audience in 1921 (see Hockett 1965.91ff).

So if it is only a plausible metaphor to say there is an (a) science likeMentalist Psychology to study that particular part of the world which is locatedat (A), there is no real harm in calling Behaviorism a separate science (B),and Linguistics yet another science (C). The subterfuge could conceal fromus that real Science must be Unified Scienceperhaps worth calling Science(D)-with (a) (b) (c) as subsets. For the time being, linguistics might use

psychological, inside, methods and terms, which are reducible in Science (B)anyway, and that is why Bloomfield could say we 'must act as though'allfindings from (A) and (B) are in, or imminent.

The linguistics of J. R. Firth is an attempt to study (a), (b), and (c) moreas a unified, interdependent complex, rather than as independent elementsrelated in unspecified ways. That makes linguistics a single discipline, theobject of which involves the triad (a)-(b)-(c). Another conception of thattotality, trying to do professional justice to its hitherto distinguished aspects,is found in concepts Bronislaw Malinowski developed for anthropology.

10.01 Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942). Malinowski was a facilepolyglot rather than a linguist. He early acquired a knack for languages fromhis father (a pioneer in Polish language and dialects) and from his multilingualmother (in Mediterranean travel after his father's early death). He firststudied physical sciences, but read omnivorously. To master English, he readFrazer's 1890 Golden Bough, and was intrigued, as his publications show, byits account of the evolution of magical, through religious, to scientific thought,from primitive to modern societies:


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314 / GENERAL LINGUISTICS

For no sooner had I begun to read this great work, than I became immersed in it and

enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is agreat science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister-sciences, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology. (Malinowski1948.72)

Malinowski won his Ph.D. in 1908 with the highest honors in the thenAustrian Empire. After two years of postdoctoral studies at Leipsig(economics with Bucher, psychology with Wundt), he enrolled in the newprogram in Anthropology at the London School of Economics, and wasawarded its doctorate in 1916 for his 1913 Family Among the Australian

Aborigines. Meanwhile, he published extensively in English and Polish,notably book reviews on topics anthropologically alien, but later incorporatedinto his own theories. These publications made of him a sort ofinterdisciplinary ambassador for Anthropology. His Trobriand Island research(1915-16, 1917-18) gave him international stature, materials for years ofpublications, and data for much of his theoretical work.

He seems rarely to have made a neutral impression. People wereattracted or repelled in about equal force and numbers, in private orprofessional life. For example, though technically an enemy alien duringWorld War I, the Australian Government helped finance his Trobriandresearch. He published constantly, is reckoned a founder of SocialAnthropology, popularized it worldwide as thefunctional study of culturereal people satisfying vital needs. In the process, he was the teacher of mostBritish and Commonwealth workers in that field between the two WorldWars. His theoretical standing is debated.

10.02 Eclecticism. Malinowski adapted insights from diverse scholars toform his original synthesis. Influences he explicitly mentioned include Frazer(but not his determinist, evolutionary, ideas), Durkheim (while rejecting hisabstractionism), Freud(though he much modified the pansexual), and Hull(but without the mechanist side of his Behaviorism). What he drew fromthem were holistic, internal-defining, as opposed to external-imposed,structural conceptions, such as those de Saussure expressed so well forlanguage. But abstractions like de Saussure's langue or Durkheim's collectiveconscience were counter to his professed concern for empirical data.

Critics see his terminological shifts as evidence either of inconsistency oran ability to adapt to new evidence. He modified earlier assumptions aboutcultural superiority. His early titles had 'savage'or 'primitive' labels. Hisviews about societies in the 1923 Ogden and Richards Supplementare notthose of his 1935 Coral Gardens. His Encyclopedia Britannica article onAnthropology (13th ed., suppl., 1926.133), stressed functionalist assumptions:

...in every type of civilization, every custom, every material object, idea and belief fulfills somevital function, has some task to accomplish, represents an indispensable part within a workingwhole.


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10 Malinowski and Firth /315

His posthumousScientific Theory of Culture

(1944) laid out relationsamong things and thought. Needs for individual survival (like food or air)differ from those required in group behavior. Values set by the group areembodied in symbols that demand, prohibit, or tolerate different responses,facilitating social evaluation. These needs, in his view, are:

...the system of conditions in the human organism, in the cultural setting, and in the relation

of both to the natural environment, which are sufficient and necessary for the survival of group

and organism. A need, therefore, is the limiting set of facts. Habits and their motivations, the

learned responses and the foundations of organization, must be so arranged as to allow the

basic needs to be satisfied. (1944.90)

Sapir pointed out the function of language as a substitute for symbolicaction, Malinowski stressed biological determinants of cultural activities, andthe delicate hierarchy of primary, derived, and integrative needs. Whenprimary needs are frustrated, cultural change is imminent. Optionalsatisfaction of derived needs allows individual diversity, a tolerably similarand cohesive world-vieweven one embodying beliefs strange to usis acondition for group stability. The complexities with which he dealt arereflected in divergent views of Malinowski's work in Man and Culture (R.Firth 1957). This book evaluates Malinowski's personal and scientificstanding, his concepts of culture, law, kinship, magic and religion, economics,social systems and change, needs, the conduct of field work, and analysis oflanguage. Those views are not as simple as (a), (b), (c).

10.3 Purpose and Culture. The defense ofteleology in culture ('sometask to be accomplished') is not dominant in Malinowski's writings. But it was

just that theme in Darwin's evolutionary hypotheses that critics found abackward step in natural science. It might have been explained bydistinguishing inanimate nature and social reality, or by suggesting thatsociety's purposes are no more or less inexplicable than its social contract.Malinowski might have said it was just a manner of speaking, as Bloomfield'sreview of Sapir'sLanguage held. While psychologizing was not scientificallyrespectable, it was the only way of talking about language generallyunderstood. ((1922), Hockett 1965. 91ff) In either case, it is worth recallingour earlier discussion of the nature of explanation which empirical sciencesought to replace, and weigh whether Malinowski's Functionalism wasretrograde or compatible with either.

10.4 Description and Explanation. Western thought long accepted onebasic conception of explanation from Aristotle: complete understanding ofsomething resulted when its four causes were known. The four were labelledmaterial, formal, final, and efficient causes. Cause is an analogical term inthese four collocations. Aside from substituting matter for the first, andstructure, pattern function for the second, empirical science found little usefor the other two.


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A familiar notion ofcause was efficient cause. Its clearest example wasdeliberate human initiation of change, observable in common experience.This efficient causality effects accidental changes by rearranging matter, andits products are artifacts like a better mousetrap. Whatever is capable of such(re)formation is then viewed as material cause, its structure or arrangementas a formal cause, and the end or purpose of the artifact as its final cause.

When dealing empirically with actual material instead of ideal matter, andwith phenomena in nature rather than human products, physical sciences studya different object than metaphysical 'sciences'. Until well into the modernera, as suggested in Chapter 9, philosophic was the prestige expression and themethod most comparable to what would be called scientific today, particularlywhen applied to explanation.

None of these causes is directly experienced in what we see, feel or hear.Yet sense data is what all humans have in common. Their subjective mentalworlds may seem either irreconcilable or incommunicable. They areacknowledged to be inaccessible externally in any account. Mental cause mayeffect subjective conviction, but empirical causes are expected to produceresults anyone can observe.

It would be retrograde to look for scientific explanation outside thesystem empirical science has established. So its legitimate data must besensible: evidence must be empirical; explanation is or involves predictivesuccess for observable cooccurence. From the empirical point of view,traditional notions of cause are not objects for experiment or observation, butfor philosophic conjecture.

Human purposes and responsibility are extrasystemic considerations innatural science. Their composition, distribution or function are not empiricalobjects. Traditional discussion dwelt more on the composition of theseconcepts, their distribution and function. As structurally determined andmutually defining elements of intelligibility, they are very much intrasystemicfactors when description is held to be different from explanation.

So a curious tension arises when rival approaches to the same data, withdifferent goals, confront each other. Sometimes previously accepted causesare declared pseudo-causes; or predecessors defending them are told theyhave been merely describing, while successors will now explain.

This is quite like the atmosphere of Jakobson's teleological phonologyconfrontation with phoneticians at the First International Conference of

Linguists (1929): Phoneticians were informed that they had been doing the -etic donkey work of description, and the -emic work of phonologicalexplanation in terms of function could now take over. Similar 'demotions' areexemplified in the suggestion that syntax could supply the missing explanatoryelement in largely morphological, 'mere' descriptive work; proposals that asemantic perspective can illuminate 'mere' syntactic description; or thatpragmatics can make 'mere' abstract cognitive semantics more realistic.


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10.05 Explaining Language Use. Malinowski's functional anthropologyclaimed to explain what others just describedpoorlybecause they eitherignored teleology, or imposed putative rational goals of Western society on a(perhaps) irrational group. His work had the generic structural stamp ofworking within observable data. He professed not to assume the goal isknown, and to refrain from judging societies according to their approximationto it. Much of his theory about language was consistent with that orientation.

So his reformulations of what to look for in language use, and how toregard it, were novel and refreshing. Some of his technical terms were oftenfelicitous in making neglected aspects of language use obvious. Such are hisuse ofcontext, meaning as function, and particularly one term he coined,

photic communion, discussed in the status ofsentence and word.

10.06 Linguistic Fact. His approach to language is summed up in thissingle passage on what he saw as central problems in translation:

It might seem that the simplest task in any linguistic enquiry would be the translation

of individual terms. In reality the problem of defining the meaning of a single word and of

proceeding correctly in the translation of terms is as difficult as any which will face us. Itis, moreover, in methodological order not the first to be tackled. It will be obvious to

anyone who has so far followed my argument that isolated words are in fact only linguistic

figments, the products of an advanced linguistic analysis. The sentence is at times a self-

contained linguistic unit, but not even a sentence can be regarded as a full linguistic datum.

To us, the real linguistic fact is the full utterance within its context of situation.

(Malinowski 1935: 1965:11)

10.07 Contextual analysis. Society makes it easier for humans tofunction by integrating individuals into a group. Functions are satisfactions of

human needs, some universal, some individual. Nonfunctional are objects,practices or events which satisfy no need. Language is a functional componentof society, and 'meaningfuP to the extent that it does something about needs.Primitives, Malinowski had said (1915), have little or no need for philosophicreflection. So that cannot be an important 'meaning'of language: it must besomething much more pragmatic. Survivors have an elemental need tosurvive. They don't thinkmuch, Malinowski suggested, and if they do, theydon't talkabout it.

An elementary need in society is cooperation and avoidance of discord.

Since he found people react more to attitudinal than intellectual factors, heconcluded thatphotic communion would be an apt name for that language usewhich primarily cultivates unity, rather than imparting information. The wordsinHavea nice day! orLove you! might elsewhere concern facts about theworld. But both expressions function commonly as just the right noises tomake, given the occasion and the need for relations, casual or binding. Theydo not disclose genuine information. Their primary function is social.


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318 / GENERALLINGUISTICS

Given that assumption, the word, and less obviously, some sentences, are'products of sophisticated linguistic analysis'. The real linguistic datum is thesentence (more or less traditionally defined) in its context of situation, withthat situation in its context of culture as its immediate physical environment.Linguistic elements are distinguishable to the extent they functionhave someobservable effectin the overall context of cultural process. Language use isone form of cultural functioning.

So translation cannot be just matching words comparable in reference, orrelated in sense, since both differ even among the cultural siblings of Europe:Malinowski cites as imcomparables, English honor, German Ehre, Frenchhonneur, and Spanish honra\as untranslatable, English gentleman fair-play,German Weltschmerz, Italian bel canto and French connoisseur. (1935,1965.12)De Saussure's distinction ofsignification from value and contentimplied justthat, as did Boas' analysis ofThe man is sick. Sentence translation basedonly on grammatical approximation is insufficient: it would further obscurevalue vs. content differences. Of course, if translation is paraphrase andextensive commentaryhis own practicethen it is possible. It may be betterthan the word-for-word procedure, but it is still only an approximation.Readers still register that information, given in their own language, against thebackground of a very different culture.

10.08 Abstraction. These observations remind us that the problem forany science is how abstract it can afford to be yet still remain intelligible, orhow concrete it can afford to get, without getting lost in details. Malinowski:

But it is easy to become redundant in commentaries and by no means obvious whereto draw the line between giving too much detail on the one hand and giving an insufficientand altogether dry indication to the reader. (1935.1965.11)

His approach is intelligible, but it combines (a), (b), and (c) data withoutan autonomous (or even subsidiary) science (C), about whose nature orpossibility we are presently concerned. (A) and (B) scientists can best judgetheir representation in that scheme. In more recent terms, it proposes a studyofperformance without one of competence; Firth assumed Malinowskirejected the comparable distinction oflangue andparole:

...he explicitly dissociated himself quite early from Durkheim's philosophical basis ofsociology [1913b; 1916.423..1]. He would have nothing to do with a collective soul andpresumably had no interest in the French conception of langue as a function of thecollectrvite... he declared that the postulate of a collectivity was barren and absolutelyuseless for an ethnographic observer. (R. Firth 1957.95)

Malinowski's formula for stating 'meaning'is identical to the Behaviorists'(the sum of practical events preceding and following an utterance). But whatactuallyprecedes includes the speaker's and hearer's history since conception,whatfollows is the rest of the world's history. Restricting them verbally by


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relevantand

practicalspecifies neither the degree of abstraction required, norits basis, nor practical techniques for isolating them.Relevance within a field

defines it: phonology's vague notion of 'different in meaning is easier tospecify in speakers' overt behavior than in even briefly delayed cultural impact.

His stress on the function of utterances suggests that their entire systemhas its ultimate causeits teleology or purposeoutside an empiricallyobservable system. Or, 'meaning in this system is equated with factorssubsequent to utterance: certainly not words, nor even sentences can beassigned meaning antecedent to utterance within the logic of his approach.An autonomous science of language ought to be able to do something likethat. And since Malinowski troubles to write about these things, it would seemhe assumes 'meaning must have just the interpretation he rejects, or no onecould understand or disagree with him. His proposal is like the Sapir-WhorfHypothesis: if valid in an unqualified sense, it would either have beenimpossible for Sapir or Whorf to suspect it, or for anyone else to grasp whatlittle they had understood of it.

What Malinowski does, then, is simply to define the goals, scope andpurposes of a study involving what interests him about language (in anontechnical sense) and incorporate that, legitimately enough, into hisethnographic theory of Language. He described or referred to it often enoughas a theory of language use. He clearly hoped it would bring to light somelinguistic universale, and contribute to the understanding of humancommunication in general. This again raises the question of whether therecan be a legitimate science of language which abstracts from its use, social orintellectual. Malinowski made an unqualified claim:

Translation in the sense of defining a term by ethnographic analysis... is feasible and

is the only correct way of defining the linguistic and cultural character of a word. (1935,1965.17)

10.09 Induction and deduction in Malinowski. In defending hisoriginality on the role of magic and religion Malinowski had encountered inFrazer's Golden Bough, Symmons-Symonolewicz (1960: v.4.36-43) quotes fromhis own translation of a 1915 book of Malinowski's on the subject. Thisantedates both his Trobriand field work and Loisy^ book, from whichRadcliffe-Brown thought Malinowski had borrowed.

Given previous allusions to how rationalists and empiricists can view eachothers' work, it is instructive to see that Malinowski intended this work torefute the 'rationalistic approach to the religious phenomena'(1960.40):

Man, especially primitive man who lives in a constant struggle for survival, cannot beand is not a reasonable and reasoning being... His life is mainly emotional and active, fullof emotions and passions, and it is these elements that shape his whole behavior, and nota philosophical reflection... Primitive man has urgent strong needs, constant, sometimesdangerous, vital pursuits, and it is easy to show that these very elements lead him to the


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performance of such acts and activities which constitute a germ of religion. Up to this time

religion appeared to be an artificial theory developed out of speculations of the primitiveman... To a modern student primitive religion is not any more an artificial theory... butrather a biological necessity for the man, a result of his struggle for that existence. (1960.40-41)

This raises the question of when and how insights occur. Leach (in R.Firth 1957.119ff) contradicts this early Malinowski from his reading of latertexts, where he finds thatIt was dogma for Malinowski that all human beingsare reasonable (sensibly practical) individuals (127), and that in Malinowski'sattempt to impose 'rationality' upon his savages... (he found) that theTrobriander was more rational than himself. (128)

Empiricism as Bloomfield presents it comes to sober inductive generaliz-ations after all the objective facts have been so marshalled, that no otherinterpretation of observed co-occurrences would make sense. If Rationalistthought is exemplified in Traditional Western Grammar, to which otherlinguistic facts were expected to conform, its civilized consistency might temptone to ignore, deny, or explain away any divergence as primitive approxim-ation. But both points of departure seem complementary, when faced withthe need to adaptor adoptsome theory to explain the facts they describe.

10.10 Objectivity. Training must equip scientists with some system ofinitial categorization before experience of concrete data. For objectivity, thatmethod must be self-correcting, as Boas' fieldwork training of others insisted.In a scientific report, we expect nothing that cannot be publicly replicated orfalsified. Since few could go to the Trobriands to verify Malinowski's reports,it would seem reasonable to allow, even expect, him to mention what it wasthat 'compels us'to correlate language and activity and what 'forces us todefine meaning in terms of experience and situation'(1935.1965.9), or when itwas that he began to see the need of modifying his preconceived ideas.

This 1935 account of a Trobriand experience illustrates Malinowski's flairfor dramatizing previously dull anthropological work:

...I realized then and there what the real function of magic is. On the psychological sideit leads to a mental integration, to that optimism and confidence in the face of dangerwhich has won to man many a battle with nature or with human foes. Socially, magic, bygiving leadership to one man, establishes organization at a time when organized andeffective action is of supreme importance. (1960.44, quoted from Malinowski 1935)

Raymond Firth's assessment of Malinowski's theory/fact posture suggestsa similar interpretation:

At that time, the tradition was that an anthropologist was primarily either atheoretician or an ethnographer, and that the theory should be kept separate from thefacts. It was part of Malinowski's contribution, not only to combine them, but to show howfact was meaningless without theory and how each could gain in significance by beingconsciously brought into relation. (R. Firth 1957:2)


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10.11 John Rupert Firth (1890-1960). Firth took a Master's degree inHistory and Language at the University of Leeds in 1913, and was professorof English in Punjab in 1920. At the University of London, he studied andtaught Phonetics under Daniel Jones for ten years (1928-38) after which he

joined the School of Oriental and African Studies. He became head of itsDepartment of Phonetics in 1941, and, awarded the first Chair of GeneralLinguistics in England in 1944, he and Jones were important in spreadingrespect for linguistics as an academic discipline. He retired in 1956.

Jones, Sweet, and the empirical tradition of British scholarship were

among his formative influences. Others included personal contact withMalinowski, the challenge of vindicating linguistics as a peer discipline withstandard University studies, his interests in the history of linguistics, and in itsautonomy as a science. The latter two help account for his anti-structuraliststance, and the development of an approach to linguistics characteristic of the

London School. Aside from two popular books on general linguistic topics,his publications were mainly technical papers. But he engaged in exchange ofideas with other scholars and with his faculty, carefully monitoring theirpublications on topics suggested by his reflections on linguistics.

Exemplification of his ideas on prosodic analysis, for instance, is found inpapers by colleagues rather than in his own. He seemed to communicate bestan air, an attitude, a slant, or emphasis, on the need for studying actuallanguage in actual use, and a concern for a holistic concept of 'meaning'as amodality of all levels of analysis.

10.12 Meaning. Like Malinowski's, Firth's conception of the goal oflinguistics can appear romantic, impossible, self-defeating, but attractivelyconcrete. That assessment would be inevitable if the object of linguistic

analysis were an entire language. But Firth saw its data as appropriatelyrestricted languages, dialectal or stylistic subsets within languages, or in familiarsituations like preaching or military drill. Others included the situation ofrequesting something at table: some pout, or poke, or point; others feignterminal embarrassment and inquire lengthily about the compatibility of loftypersonages with the menial work of transferring objects. In much the waythat lowerlevels of analysis have been portrayed as subordinate to higherones,Firth took'meaning'to be the holistic function of speech and its components:

It can be described as a serial contexualization of our facts, context within context,each one being a function, an organ of a bigger context and all contexts finding a place inwhat may be called the context of culture. (Technique of Semantics 54)

Firth prided himself on his own empiricism, and extolled that tradition inBritish linguistic work. The highest accolade he awards in his evaluation ofMalinowski was to show that he was almost British in that regard. LikeMalinowski, Firth borrowed or absorbed much from the insights of others, butdissociated himself from what he considered their unempirical and empiricalfailings. Malinowski's material contexts, for instance, became abstract


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categorizations for Firth; his monism was not the 'foolish bogey'Firth foundin the antimentalism of Bloomfieldians, but was dictated on empirical grounds,since everyone claimed to know so little about minds. (J.R.Firth 1957.7)

Unlike Malinowski, he saw the need for, and set about outlining, anindependent science of language. Its task was the statement of 'meaning'.The levels of linguistic analysis others approached as external to, onlydistinctive of, or the setting for, meanings (phonetics, phonology, lexicon,morphology, syntax, situation), he proposed to regard as constructs whosefunction it was to allow the dispersion of unitary meaning into convenientfactors for specialized study. His suggestive analogy was the prismatic

dispersion of light into the distinct colors of the spectrum: linguistic theoryand its categories are to solidary meaning as the prism is to light-both humanartifacts. Reversing perspectives guarantees 'renewal of connection' withexperience.

10.13 Context of situation. Firth notes that Malinowski credits PhilipWegener (1885) as the first to propose an interesting version of a contextualapproach to meaning. This required neither postulation of Durkheim'scollective soul or Saussure's langue, only observation of factors individuals

appreciate as institutionalizedin their own society, and reinterpretation by thescientist. While Malinowski could focus on culture, the linguist mustconcentrate on texts. The point of departure should be institutionalizedconcepts found in native words and taxonomies rather than those of theinvestigator. Hence the importance Malinowski attached to mastering thenative language, and the stress Firth laid on real rather than fanciful linguisticdata. He approved of Malinowski's interest in Temple's (1899) sketch of aUniversal Grammar. Malinowski borrowed the technique of interlinear glosseswith extended commentaries from Templeperhaps the first and chief

'linguistic' formation he acquired by the reading he reported doing inMelbourne, between his first and second visits to the Trobriands. Templesaid:

Of course, grammarians will know that all this is syntax, and I will now explain why

I consider that it is far more important to study function than form as essential to the

correct apprehension of words, and how to my mind accidence arises properly out of syntax

and not the other way round, as we have all been taught... I found myself, in building up

the theory, compelled, in order to work out the argument logically, to commence where the

accepted Grammars ended, viz. at the sentence, defining the sentence as the expression of

a complex meaning, and making that the unit of language. (1899a.2: in R. Firth 1957.98)

J.R. Firth found Malinowski made little use of those insights andremained 'reasonably traditional, but grammatically unsystematic' (R. Firth1957.98). He agreed with Malinowski that a functional method was comple-mentary, rather than antithetic, to the then predominant historical approach:

... the development of descriptive linguistics on a large scale is an essential preliminary for

the reformulation of problems in comparative and historical work. This could only be the


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case if...linguistics recognizes that its principle objective is the study of meaning in its own

terms. (R. Firth 1957.100-1)

That tidy distinctions between purely empirical or rational approaches areto be taken with a grain of salt emerges from his conclusion: empiricalMalinowski contributed little to his Ogden/Richards Supplementgoal:

We need a Theory, devised for the purpose of observation of linguistic fact. Thistheory would give a recast of grammatical definitions, based on an analysis of meaning. Itwould analyze the nature of syntax, parts of speech and the formation of words, andbesides giving adequate and plastic definitions would open up vistas of problems and thus

guide research... And here, I cannot refrain from repeating a favorite quotation fromGoethe: Das Hochste ware zu begreifen, das alles Faktische schon Theorie ist. [The mostimportant thing is to understand that "facts" are only "facts" in terms of a theory.'] (J.R.Firth 1957.101)

10.14 Facts. Firth's quotation from Goethe more or less repeats whatMalinowski often insisted on, thatfacts are only facts in the light of sometheory. This insight so impressed Firth that he chose it as the heading for hisretrospective Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930-1955, published a year afterhis retirement. (Studies in Linguistic Analysis 1957) Firth distinguishes hissituational approach from Malinowski's, Gardiner's, and Wegener's:Malinowski's was enthnographic, his own, linguistic; Gardiner's position wasclose to Wegener's, yet differed on the basis of its 'realism'. Wegenerdiscusses three things basic to a situation as determining what one says: (1)what there is to see, (2) what one actively recalls, and (3) concomitantawareness of one's whole state of mind. Firth's approach eliminated twoelements of Wegener's triad (present recall and consciousness of personalidentity) but retained 'the objective situation as presented and observed', since:

A serious confusion of the analysis of the context of situation with the other levels ofanalysis such as the grammatical level, has been one of the main weaknesses of earlyattempts to relate statements of meaning to other social and psychological factors. (J.R.Firth 1957.103)

10.15 Ecology. What all these approaches have in common iscomparable to ecological concerns: everything interpenetrates and affectseverything else. This is the essential structuralist view. In The Tongues of

Men ((1937) 1964.34)), Firth used the term implications to stress solidarityamong parts of Language, illustrated by Saussure-like associative relations(35), the formation of sets peculiar to personal expectations (90), Pareto'sresidues and derivations (96 ff.), Carnap's logical syntax (105 f.), andWhitehead's concept of mutual prehension (110f.). He finds othercontextualists 'did not grasp the full implications of Wegener's hints... A generaltheory such as this must include similar approaches in other branches oflinguistic analysis', (in R.Firth 1957.103)


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10.16 Firthian contextual analysis vs. Malinowski's. Firth denied

Malinowski's techniques were linguistic analysis:

This expression as used by linguists refers to highly abstract analyses of a givenlanguageusually a restricted languageat the phonological level, at various grammaticallevels and in the summary entries of dictionaries. Malinowski fully realized hisshortcomings in linguistic analysis as we now understand it, and said so explicitly. Theanalysis to which I now proceed can be given only in an approximate manner, for in a fullone, a long disquisition on grammar would have to be given first.' He never managed torealize what may have been his secret ambition - a technique of analysis satisfying thedemands of linguistic science. (R. Firth 1957.105-6)

Malinowski's technique was to give (1) an interlinear translation thatmatches native words and formatives with an English 'fixed equivalent', (2) afree translation, (3) a combination of (1) and (2), then (4) a detailedcommentary called 'the contextual specification of meaning', with phonetic andgrammatical notes. Firth rejectsfixed equivalents as he did the distinction ofprimary and derived meanings (cf. Bloomfield 1933.149ff). Collocationalstudies (e.g. to determine interpretations of English ass) show that word-meanings are not fixed, but context-dependent in Structures; that words

derive their meanings from sentences, not vice versa; that they can be 'fixed'to cover systems (as he defined structure and system) is another matter:

10.17 System and Structure.

Systems of units or terms, set up by the linguist, provide sets of interior relations bymeans of which their values are mutually determined. In order to have validity, suchsystems must be exhaustive and closed, so far as the particular state of the language,suitably restricted, is under description. (R. Firth 1957.107)

...the terms structure and system (are) distinct in technical use. Structures are abstractionsfrom utterances or parts of utterances recorded textually. Thus CVCVC and Noun-Verb-Noun might each constitute a structure specifically defined in a particular language at thephonological and grammatical levels respectively. A structure is said to comprise elementsor categories in mutual syntagmatic relation. At any given level of analysis closed systemsof categories, units or terms are set up to give mutually determined values to the elementsof structure. The terms of a system, or of a sub-system within it, commute, thus enablingaccount to be taken of the elements, constituents and features which are given order andplace in structure. (R. Firth 1957.107 f.n. 1)

Malinowski gave six Trobriand words 'equivalent' to English garden. Firth

would accept them as a lexical system. In combining free and literaltranslations, Malinowski makes additions, or he coordinates and subordinatessentences differently with English conjunctions which are absent or vaguelyrepresented in native texts (1922a.458; 1935 11.38; 1957.107), a 'double-entryprocedure' which Firth finds the same as what is 'nowadays described as the"translation meaning".'

Malinowski's steps 3 and 4 concern text, not situation, and Firth deniesthey are based on a definite grammatical and lexicographic scheme, since the


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distinction between inclusive/exclusive plurals and duals noted elsewhere isnot observed. (107 on 1922a.440) Malinowski's 'contextual specification ofmeaning'confuses phonetics, grammar, and lexicon, plus situational factorsneeded to account for what he calls the 'telegraphic', context-dependent, natureof the language. But for Firth:

Grammar is concerned with the interrelation of categories, not of the words as such,and cannot be derived from any context other than that of grammatical analysis. (R. Firth1957.109)

He finds Malinowski's grammar notional, not linguistic. Saying a phoneticelement b may connect a verb with future, or perhaps potentiality in any tense,or perhaps just give emphasis, confounds levels of analysis and does not justifythe English gloss might. (Coral Gardens 11.31). It is more notional thanphonetic to say the sound l connotes definiteness, or 'places the action into aregular past, accomplished state... at times only gives emphasis... The letter 11have rendered by the fixed meaning "did"...' {Coral Gardens 11.32)

Malinowksi tacitly accepts grammatical categories as universals when he

says transitive and intransitive verbs are hard to distinguish, or that passive islacking. While he deals better with classificatory particles, he has no canonicallexical entry form (108). Malinowski knew his phonetics was superficial, butdebated inconclusively with himself whether more phonetic detail might notbe counterproductive. He resorts instead to impressions: 'alliteration dear to...thumping rhythm indicated by sharp and circumflex accents... perfunctory

performance... fewer melodic modulations and phonetic peculiarities...phonetically expressive... vowels with Italian values and impressive ring'.

10.18 Malinowki's strong points. Firth lists Malinowski's positivecontributions to linguistics under four headings:

I. General theory, especially his use of the concepts of context ofsituation and types of speech function. (Coral Gardens 11.53;1923a.475-7)

II. The statement of the meaning of a word by definition withreference to culture context.

III. The statement of meaning by translation.IV. The relations of (i) language and culture; and (ii) linguistics andanthropology. (110)10.19 Constructs. Compared then to his own linguistic theory,

Wegener's arealism contrasts with Gardener's and Malinowski's realistapproach, and that is an oddity, given Malinowski's stress on theory. Itsuggests that brute facts existindependent of and prior to any statement offact, as quoted above: 'to us, the real linguistic fact is the full utterance within


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its context of situation'. Firth has thought out what he considers a defensiblerelation between theoretical constructs like Circle, and the data of experiencestated in terms of them, e.g. Tires are circular. Apparently Malinowski hadnot, since Firth finds that

...the word utterance seems to have had an almost hypnotic suggestion of reality whichoften misleads him into the dangerous confusion of a theoretical construct with items ofexperience. The factors or elements of a situation, including the text, are abstractions fromexperience and are not in any sense embedded in it, except perhaps in an applied scientificsense, in renewal of connection with it. (Ill)

Firth says he first used context of situation in his Speech (1930); his morerecent position makes explicit that

... the context of situation and the notion of types of speech function are best used asschematic constructs to be applied to language events and that they are merely a group ofrelated categories at a different level from grammatical categories but of the same abstractnature. The linguist sets up interior relations of three kinds:

(1) the interior relations of elements of structure, words and other bits and pieces of thetext;

(2) the interior relations of systems set up to give values to elements of structure andthe bits and pieces;

(3) the interior relations of contexts of situation.1020 Context of Situation. The interior relations of the context of

situation may be summarized as follows:

A. The Relevant Features of participants: persons, personalities.(i) The Verbal Action of the Participants,

(ii) The Non-verbal Action of the Participants

B. The Relevant Objects.

The Effect of the Verbal Action. (112)

Individual situations are infinite in number and variety, typical situationshave not been defined structurally. Firth found Malinowski's Coral Gardensand Their Magic (1937) was one attempt, Pareto's Sociology another, and gavean offhand list of ten factors that might be profitably considered:

One method of tabulation would comprise ten entries as follows: (i) type of contextof situation; (ii) type of speech function; (iii) the language text and language mechanism;(iv) the restricted language to which the text belongs; (v) the syntactical characteristics ofthe text (colligation); (vi) other linguistic features of the text and mechanism, includingstyle and tempo; (vii) features of collocation; (viii) the creative effect or effective result;(ix) extended collocations and (x) memorial allusions, providing serial links with precedingor following situations. (Synopsis 1957:10)


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10 Malinowski and Firth/327

Firth is puzzled by Malinowski's attitude toward individual words, sincehis ethnographic work presupposes and demonstrates that words are institut-ionalized. Part of his critique might have been written by one of theModistae:

The descriptive linguist does not work in the universe of discourse concerned withreality or what is real, and is not concerned with the ontological question of whether hisisolates can be said to have an existence or to exist Let us again emphasize that factsdo not exist, they are stated, and it may indeed be a better guide to the handling of factsto regard them as myths in which we believe and which we have to live with. (Synopsis1957:113)

1021 Dictionary Definitions. Firth finds dictionary definitions are asdangerous as they are useful because of their preoccupation with historicalvalues. Malinowski's analysis offreedom's multiple meanings in its universeof semantic chaos'is 'perhaps the most interestingfull-length commentary on theuse ofa common wordFirth knew of, and occasioned remarks by Malinowskithat Firth thought to be of central importance (in Freedom and Civilization,1947): all mental states which are postulated as occurrences within the privateconsciousness of man are thus outside the realm of science (84), and We have

often stressed that in science we must run counter to linguistic usage. This iseven more important in social science than in the study of matter or organism.(80) (1957.113-14) People do take fixed attitudes to words, but the physicistdoes not inquire through universal suffrage or a Gallup Poll what the meaningsof his concepts are (81). These statements agree with Firth's idea, thatlinguistic metalanguage refers chiefly to structures, systems and relations. Ourtask is observation, analysis, synthesis, and renewal of connection. (114)

1022 Translation Meaning. Malinowski's contributions are most

important, but 'translation meanings, however systematic, do not in themselvesconstitute linguistic analysis' (115). Recalling logic's de re and de dictodistinction-wbat statements refer to, or statements themselves), Firth callsattention to the distinction of use and mention of linguistic items. Moreexplicitly, he cites differences among (i) language under description, (ii)language of description, and (iii) language of translation: (iii) subdivides into(a) word-translation meanings and (b) translation meanings offered as ameans of identifying larger pieces, or as names for other native categoriessupplied by informants (115). He finds Malinowski's warning worth repeating:

But there is nothing more dangerous than to imagine that language is a processrunning parallel and exactly corresponding to mental process, and that the function oflanguage is to reflect or duplicate the mental reality of man in a secondary flow of verbalequivalents. (Coral Gardens II.7; 1957.115)

1023 Linguists' translation Contributions. He invites comparison ofMalinowski's contributions with the results (UAL 1953) of a meeting oflinguists, anthropologists and philosophers. Levi-Strauss there outlined the


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problematic as: (1) relations between a language and a culture, (2) languageand culture, (3) linguistics as a scientific discipline and anthropology.Discussions showed superficial agreement in terminology obscures rather thanfosters communication (116). He quotes from Jakobson's contribution onnorms of relevance changing within linguistics, mentioned above:

One of the most symptomatic features of this Conference was that we lengthily andpassionately discussed the questions of meaning... meaning remains a No Man's land. Thisgame of Give-away must end. For years and decades we have fought for the annexationof speech-sounds to linguistics, and thereby established phonemics. Now we face a secondfront: the task of incorporating linguistic meaning into the science of language. (1953.19,21;1957.116)

Firth immediately appended to this, It is my personal opinion thatlinguistics is suffering from a surfeit of phonemics and that our energies mustturn to the second front (117). In the same vein, he thought Hockett'sconclusion that ethnography without linguistics is blind; linguistics withoutethnography is sterile (1954.225) should read linguistics without meaning issterile', while agreeing with him that 'it had better be the linguists who work onthis systematic end of semantics (1954.250)~Firth's way:

...linguistics at all levels of analysis is concerned with meaningful human behavior in societyand that the structures and systems and other sets of abstractions set up enable congruentstatements of meaning to be made in exclusively linguistic terms... statements aboutlanguage data in terms of phonetics, phonology, grammar, stylistics, lexicography andtextual analysis in a background of statements of collocation and contexts of situation asI understand those terms. (117-8)

In short, he finds Malinowski's contribution consists of sporadic comments,immersed and perhaps lost in what is properly called his ethnographic

analysis. The two should be kept separate, but for later synthesis:

His outstanding contribution to linguistics was his approach in terms of his generaltheory of speech functions in contexts of situation, to the problem of meaning in exoticlanguages and even in our own. (118)

10.24 Structure and Structuralism in Firth. De Saussure anticipated aparaphrase of Whitehead's 'Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness': not what it is,but what it contrasts with, constitutes a (linguistic) reality. Firth heldPhonemics neglected insights constituent of science (C) by overly stressing

columnar I-IV contrasts, thus neglecting their syntagmatic, contrastive reality.Prosodic analysis was to study this neglected half of phonology.

1025 Implications. Firth chose to praise Malinowski as being no morea structuralistthan he. For him, that term referred to what he saw as obviousomissions and confusions in Linguistics as practiced by Bloomfieldians, e.g.relating phonemes as super-structures and allophones as alternations insubstructures'. His evidence was Malinowski's observation that


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...the structure of all this linguistic material is inextricably mixed up with, and dependent

upon, the course of the activity in which the utterances are embedded. (Malinowski

1923.473; Firth 1957.101)

That one must study language structurally, Firth had no doubt, but hefound conceptual and practical confusions in the 'structuralist' grasp oflanguage 'structure'.

10.26 Actual and Potential Data. Saussure had defined la langue as pureform, the intersection of two sets of relations he labelled associative (in

absentia) and syntagmatic (in prasentia). There is an observable empiricalrelation between any item inparole, and other linguistic items with which itco-occurs: these are actual, present, syntagmatic relations.

But even inparole, this concept of structure demands that there alwaysbe potential, unrealized, empirically absent determinants which constitute thevaleurof what does occur. These are all items associated with it throughsimilarity or dissimilarity in form or content.

These are not empirical on a par with syntagmatic relations. Definingthem through positive as well as negative psychological associations makes

them empirically inaccessible.1

Basing them on formal or semantic similaritiesand differences, makes them empirically remote. Hjelmslev proposed an axisoi paradigmatic relations to replace subjective sets. This permits comparisonbetween attested forms and identifiable substitutes. (Actes du QuatriemeCongres Internationale de Linguistes 1936.140).

Firth alluded to these distinctions in his popularization The Tongues ofMen in an example of syntagmatic implications among word-stresses in astring like You know what I mean; You know what I mean: You know what

I mean; You know what I mean; You know what7 mean; and You know what

I mean: ((1937), 1964)): each shift of stress has implications for thepronunciation and interpretation of each member, as well as for interpretationof the whole. These same facts are presented more technically by restrictingthe terms system and systemic to a paradigmatic axis, while structure andstructural pertain exclusively to syntagmatic relations.

1027 Polysystemic Analysis. Language must be examined, he insisted,at all levelson the basis of structures and systems. But there will be asmany systems to discuss as there are points of intersection that interest the

linguist. Hispolysystemic approach in phonology predictably yields differentelements and relations than the minimal pair test in phonemics, which Firthfound deficient because it was monosystemic.

Phonemics uses commutation (the minimal pair test) to inventorycontrasts that signal 'different in meaning'. The 'pairing" is systemic, abstractedfrom structural setting. So contrast between CONvictand conVICTestablishesstress as a phoneme of English. But these forms contrast only inmetalinguistic use {Did you say CONvict or conVICT?). In We will conVICT


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the CONvict, they are in complementary distribution. Because phonemicmethod prohibits 'mixing levels', syntactic phenomena are irrelevant at themorphological or lexical level. On the principle, 'once a phoneme, always a

phoneme', this approach provides a single System of phonemic contrasts.Pofysystemic analysis yields as many elements and systems as there are

relevant intersections. But relevant is defined in terms of the interests,purposes, and criteria of the analyst. When more than the lexically distinctivefunction of segments is relevant, different elements and combinations must be'set up'to recognize and deal with them.

10.28 Collocation and colligation. Distinctions of system and structureare not peculiar to phonology. Firth proposed the term collocation forsyntagmatic relations among lexical items, and colligation for syntagmaticrelations among grammatical categories. Both are forms ofimplication. The

constant involved in a formula for logical implication is a relationship,expressible in English byIf... then; variables which can fill that logical form inthe present discussion are lexical or grammatical items.

For collocations, Firth speaks of relations of 'mutual expectancy'determining interpretation of pairs like sheer hypocrisy or mere detail. Forsome speakers, hypocrisy and detail rarely occur without sheerand mere; forothers (and in language itself) their combination is an option. Colligations, onthe other hand, are intralinguistic demands among grammatical categories forall speakers. For instance, in independent clauses, Attic Greek providesoptions among indicative, subjunctive, and optative moods, corresponding toactual, possible, or desirable viewpoints. In subordinate clauses, manyoccurrences of indicative, subjunctive or optative are predictable as tied to,demanded by, or colligated with, the tense of the independent verbs.

Implication2is more general than relations in grammar or logic, and is notlimited to syntagmatic relations. Successions of events constitute syntagmaticrelations (Firth's structural axis). Their kinds are determined paradigmatically(Firth's axis ofsystem), such as past, present, future; factual or contrary to

fact; actual orpotential; successions by chance, or as consequences oflaws(natural, legal, moral, psychological, economic, political, social, logical,associative, linguistic, etc.).

The notion ofrelevance here is again operative. Syntagmatic relationshold among any actual succession of linguistic items by definition (as amongelements in ecology). But our control of the ecology progresses by describingecological systems, and explanation may result when higher systems areidentified. Refining the specific ways in which items in linguistic systems areinterdependent requires a linguistic abstraction. Firth labelled two suchabstractions colligation and collocation, because the domain of demandrelations is clearer among grammatical categories than the extent oftolerationamong lexical items. Colligations are observable and predictable on the basisof the language spoken; collocations correlate with what just happen to bediscussed in a particular language.


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10 Malinowski and Firth / 331

10.29 Lexicon and Grammar. But if Firth's coinage of the collocation vs.colligation distinction raises, without solving, the lexicon vs. grammardistinction, it offers another resource for some perplexed grammatical usage.For instance, particles called prepositions and prefixes were confused in ancientgrammars. Bloomfield distinguished them as free and bound forms. Latergrammars called particles governing (implicated with) cases of other freeformsprepositions, while bound particles calledprefixes may not affect theforms to which they are bound in the same way.

German 'separable prefixes' [Er ubersetzt (das Buch) ('He translates (the

book))';Er setzt tiber (den Zaun) 'He jumps over (the fence)'], and English'postposed prepositions' (The house I was telling you about; the mess we'vegotten into; much sought after, impossible to work with) seem to be halfwaybetween grammatical demands and lexical options. Either /or distinctionsdistort three-term or more-term options.

In IE languages, the relation of the category Verb and the subcategoryTense is colligation; in languages where time distinction is optional, it iscollocation if a word likeyesterday suffices to express it. Where the categoryVerb demands expression of knowledge vs. report (as in Quechua, Turkish,

and Acoma) the relation is colligation; in English, adding as I know or sothey say are phrasal, not lexical, and optional, not obligatory.

1030 Connotations. Collocations help distinguish connotations: inAmerican English, two professions predominate by 'habitual accompaniment'(another of Firth's notes of collocation) by goodthe clergy and doctors.Journalists disarm suspicion of bias by referring to the good pastoror thegood doctorwhen their debatable acts or opinions are reported, never thegood lawyeror the good dentist. Occasionally one reads ofthe good Senator.

Collocations reinforce weakening bonds between sense and reference inexpressions like true facts, free elections, dedicated scholar, spirited charger,real truth. Sports collocations with awesome, fantastic, dazzling superb,

professional, etc. rival theatrical commentary in relativizing nominal senses.

1031 Structural Conditioning. We have seen one kind of unilateralconditioning of a linguistic form in Aristotle's addition of Quantification toPlato's either/or definitions by dichotomy. A term like man can stand forman-in-general, an indifferent number of men, or a single man. The number

of referents (extension) can vary while sense (intension, definition) remainidentical (rational animal). These are signalled in English by zeromodification (0/man) or addition of quantifiers like all, some or one.

We then saw that by Petrus Hispanus' time, mutual or bilateralconditioning was recognized. He added qualitative modification to quantifiers'ability to extend or restrict a term's extension in his discussion of mutualinfluence among nouns, verbs, adjectives and restrictive relative clauses: whileman can be used to refer to anything meeting the sense rational animal, in tallman, the word man refers only to tall rational animals; reciprocally, while the


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sense oftall by itself has to do with exceeding a norm, in tall man it refersonly to + norm-rational-animals.

Determination of colligations has always been the business, usuallydispatched rather readily, of grammarians: they involve closed sets. Lexicalsets are open, but woven together into the intelligible unity demanded by alanguage's grammatical class meanings plus possible modifications. WhatFirth contributed to this discussion was a way of incorporating someextralinguistic factors in the context of speech situations that also helpdetermine interpretations.

1032 Prosodic analysis. Implications are to be investigated at all levelsof analysis. Firth saw axes of linguistic functioning at the intersection ofsystems and structures: these are his technical terms for paradigmatic(systemic) and syntagmatic (structural) relations:

S Y S S t r u cT u r e E M

Studies in Linguistic Analysis (1957) contains Firth's own Synopsis ofLinguistic Theory and exemplification of its ideas in papers by eight otherscholars. Some terms clarify their perspective:

(i) The raw material for phonetics is referred to as thephonic material. From suchphonic material, phonic data are selected which may be described and recorded aspercepta by the techniques of phonetics. Selected phonic data, phonetically described,are allotted tophonematic and prosodic categories, distributed in units, terms, classes,structures, and systems.(ii) A fundamental distinction is made between structures and their elements which aresyntagmatic, and systems ofunits or terms which commute and provide values for theelements.(iii) The theory ofexponents, linking the phonic data phonetically described withcategories of phonology and grammar, is a central necessity of linguistic analysis atcongruent levels. (1957.vi-vii)

His phonology is not exhausted in phonemics' identification of systemicdistinctive units. He adds a construct explicating how sounds function asstructural elements as well. While morphophonemics involved grammaticalmeanings by relating forms like singular wife, plural wives, or nominal mouth,verbal mouth, that approach still assumes that its solutions must be stated interms of the single paradigmatic set of phonemes discovered by commutation(the minimal pair test), or in terms of the distinctive features of whichphonemes consist.


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10 Malinowski and Firth/333

Some syntagmatic units (Firth's structural elements) have always beenrecognized in labeb likesyllable, consonant cluster, morpheme, word, phrase,clause, sentence. If their ultimate constituents were morphemes, mediateconstituents could be morpheme-words, or words consisting of morphemeswith paradigmatic contrasts neutralized in syntactic analysis. No one wouldquarrel with the identification ofwith all deliberate speedand quickly as anadverbial function, despite the absence of an adverb in the former expression.This phrase and adverb are in parallel distribution; the phrase is a substitutefor adverb, shares its class meaning and contributes its own constituent

meanings-adverbially (cf. Bloomfield 1933.251).

Syntagmatic units (syllables, consonant clusters) in phonemic phonologyare not established on the basis of distinctive lexical function. They areframes within which the distribution of phonemes is conveniently stated. Inboth, distinctive function is effected by phonemes, not their concatenation.Syllables as units of rhythmic function are not comparable with the distinctivefunction of phonemes. Plus juncture as phonemic in English was resisted bythose who failed to hear the fourth degree of stress it entails; others couldadmit it as a potential clarification rather than an actual distinction on a par

with segmental contrasts. Clear instances are difficult to locate and probablyas rare as the potential confusions they are meant to distinguish.What Firth intuited about phonology was that there are syntagmatic units,

or segmental units with syntagmatic implications of a phonetic nature, therelevance of which has not been recognized because of the monosystemicpresuppositions of the phonemic approach. Linguists can agree that unitsdefine each other negatively by contrast. So emphasis on their positivecomposition (Firth's exponence) can be misleading. Firth distinguishesbetween the phonic exponence of syntagmatic units he labebprosodies andtheir more abstract phonological contrasts and functions. A science is free todefine units within its own domain. It is neither falsified by, nor responsiblefor, data defined to be tractable within another discipline. It is not surprisingthat attempts to define prosodies in terms of 'what they are' {composition) asopposed to what they do' (function) or 'where they are found' (distribution)has caused confusion even among those convinced that he was on tosomething important (cf. Matthews' review of Bazell et al. 1966). Their

function has to do with 'meaning in Firth's idiosyncratic grasp of that term.

1033 Phonemes and phonematic units. Firth labelled the phoneme atranscribeme. This seems to relegate it to a preliminary, descriptive stage inlinguistics, as phonetics was demoted by phonological explanation. But Pike'ssubtitle of his Phonemics as 'a technique for reducing languages to writing'aptly describes the monumental contribution to a civilization that techniquemakes. Firth had no intention of replacing phonemic transcription with hisnon-transcriptional analysis. To call any stage of linguistics mere descriptionobscures the fact that any description is an implicit comparison and so animplicit explanation.


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Like familiar phonemes, phonematic units are isolated by commutationin minimal pairs. But phonic features (like the aspiration of thep'sin popup)are not abstracted from different places and then assigned to a single segmenttaken to recur there.Ifpopup's initial voiceless stop is aspirate and released,its medial nonaspirate but released, and its final neither aspirate nor released,there are three different systems of voiceless stops. Nothing a priori preventsassignment of features like aspiration or tense articulation to more than onephonological element such as both the phonematic unitp and the syllablepo.

Aspiration is a syntagmatic phenomenon, not just a paradigmatic orsegmental one. The breathiness ofaspiration affects the first syllable of popup,but is arrested by the second voiceless stop and does not persist throughoutthe second and third syllables. While isolated [i] is usually assigned spreadarticulation, the lip-rounding characteristic of English [r] persists throughoutthe production of reek. It is a syntagmatic or structuralnot just aparadigmatic, systemicfactor. Such syntagmatic implications are prosodic.

These phonic facts can have functional implications. Firth recognizedphonetic meaning', since it is part of the 'meaning'of a native speaker tosound like a native speaker. Pronouncingpopup without its aspirate pattern,or reek without rounded articulation, marks the speaker as a nonnativespeaker of English. For such reasons, Firth rejected the Phonemic labelredundantfor aspiration or lip-rounding in these words as inappropriate.

Turkish words show vowel harmony.Adam ('man'), plural adamlar, anddative plural adamlardan contrasts with ev ('house'), plural evler, and dativeplural evlerden. The fronted vs. back vocalic articulations of these words aresyntagmatic, structural contrasts, and their domain is the word, compared tosyllabic domains in popup or reeking. These contrasts are syntagmatic, notparadigmatic. For Firth, the contrast is not redundant.

1034 IPA A useful contribution of Phonetics might have been to providea distinct symbol for every distinct sound in every distinct language of theworld. If this ever had been the aim of the International PhoneticAssociation, it soon ceded to two practical determinations: The prohibitivecost of type for such an alphabet, and the notion of the Phoneme as acontrastive, rather than as a substantive unit.

The British distinction between broad and narrow (more or less phonemicvs. refined phonetic) transcription is based upon two different facts aboutlanguage: phonetic transcription equips trained personnel to symbolize signalsidentical in articulation to those of native speakers; accurate phonemicnotation equips them to produce the same number of distinctions as natives.

If phonological notation is based on sound articulatory analysis, itssymbols command articulations central to realizations of a language'sdistinctive set of oppositions; if based on acoustic rather than articulatorydistinctions, the results are as problematic as what natives actually attend to.In English, nondistinctive (hence, phonemically redundant) aspiration moreoften distinguishes initial stops than the presence or absence of phonemically


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distinctive voicing. If aspiration is omitted inI am very fond of cats, Englishspeakers tend to hearIam very fond of gats.

Empirically, voiceless stops, as segments, consist of silence. Phonemicanalysis of English might be said to attribute allophonic aspiration to silenceas to a segment (relevant to Firth's system) on a par with other continuants.Spectrographic or kymographic analysis suggest that aspiration is a mode oftransition from silence to continuant (relevant to Firth's structure). Nophonemicist would deny that analysis.

1035 Prosodies vs. Phonemes. Phonemic analysis establishes contrasts.Contrasts imply choice. Choice implies options, characteristic of phonemes.Natives do not choose to produce or inhibit the automatic co-articulationscalled allophonic in their choice of distinctive contrasts. Automatic, allophonicarticulations are part of the native's 'trained incapacities'. Natives attend onlyto distinctive features when other natives speak. Most have to be retrainedto hear nondistinctive sounds in normal pronunciation, just as natives generallynotice only deviance from their own unformulated social conventions:conformity is the normal and unremarked ambience in a community.

Professional retraining in how to listen can inculcate a phonetic orphonemic attitude. Firth was a student and colleague of Daniel Jones, and heof Henry Sweet, so attention to the positive, additive, data of phonetics wasmore habitual to Firth than the negative, contrastive perspective of thephonemicist. If the end-product of a contrastive notation is the goal, thephonetic observation of the phonemicist can be preconditioned in terms ofparadigmatic contrasts. This is the basic goal of the minimal pair test.

When the end-product is to be holistic, i.e., both paradigmatic (Firth'ssystem) and syntagmatic (Firth's structure), phonetic observation is differentlyconditioned. The phonological level is not even methodologically autonomous,but viewed as one of a set of 'congruent' techniques to deal with holisticMeaning. It attends e.g., to English aspiration syntagmatically and calls it aprosody, it attends to the paradigmatic starting point of aspiration and callsits exponence a phonematic unit. Use of technical terms like 'phoneticsubstitution counters' instead of allophones or phonemes should not obscurethe role of the minimal pair test inevitably involved in discovering the requisitesegments, even in prosodic analysis, but does suggest that phonologicalanalysis need not to stop there.

Just what the function of structural (syntagmatic) units at the phonologicallevel is will depend on the language. It is plausible to assume that somelanguages might not be illuminated by anything more than a phonemicanalysis (cf. Lyons 1962). Evidence from other languages suggests thatprosodic phenomena deserve separate statement.

1036 Non-lexical Distinctions. If, as the Terena analysis suggests toBendor-Samuel in Bazell 1966, grammatical functions can be realized prosod-ically, then phonemic analysis alone can overlook facts. If, as Praguian


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analysis early suggested, functions of phonemes are demarcative andculminative, not just distinctive, then a prosodic analysis of languages likeTurkish or Hungarian, where vowel-harmony marks out word separation, isa neat addition.

The remote control explanation of retroflexion in Sanskrit (Allen 1951)held that an earlier phoneme controlled the articulation of subsequent ones.This was inexplicable empirically to some as assimilation or dissimulation,because of the affected consonants were not contiguous, so was considered anexplanation repugnant to empirical sentiment. But to Firth it would beaesthetically satisfying, and regarded as empirically acceptable, to postulate

retroflexion as a word-prosody with noncontiguous consonants within its scope.

Eugenie Henderson's 1948 Prosodies in Siamese: a study in synthesis(Palmer 1970), often cited as a clear application of prosodic analysis, waspublished the same year as Firth's foundational .Source and Prosodies (Palmer1-26). Where Firth is theoretical and programmatic, Henderson is applied.Her opening paragraph deserves attentive reading, since Firth monitoredpapers of his Group, and this text can be taken to reflect precisely the thrustof Firth's insights as then understood, but only as applied to Siamese (Thai):

The termprosodic feature is applied in this paper to certain propertiesof modern spoken Siamese which may be regarded as abstractions apartfrom the consonant and vowel systems. Such abstractions may be madeat the syllable, word, or sentence level. Syllable prosodies include tone,quantity, and those prosodies which mark the beginning or end of asyllable. Word prosodies include tonal and quantitative features, stress,and the means whereby syllable is linked with syllable. Sentenceprosodies include sentence tone, and the means used to mark the

beginnings and end of phrases and sentences, and to connect phrase withphrase or sentence with sentence. Italic type is used to show theconsonant and vowel units, and to name the prosodies, while heavy romantype is used for phonetic transcription in general terms.

Notes

1. Inability to specify such associations publicly and objectively was pinpointed as a characteristic

of nonscientific mentality, in Bloomfield's review of Wundt's Vdlkerpsychohgie ((1913), Hockett

1956.39ff). Martin Gardiner (1983) identifies ability to link remote associations as the Art of Break-

through Thinking.

1. Implication derives from a metaphor of weaving strands into a totality; it suggests the image of

language as a net constituted by its intersections; it is lexically paraphrased in Collocations like:

"connected and interacting inferences about invo/vement of Accomplices implicated in the

accomplishment of aconspiracy deducible from the logical consequences deriveable from assumed

premises containedin the evidence". Matthews' 1968 review in Language ofIn Memory of J.R.

Firth deals with a study employing the Firthian notion of Collocation.


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