John Rupert Firth quotes

The phonetic animal par excellence is man. All men are born with an infinite capacity for making noises and using them. (John Rupert Firth)
In English we have noticed twenty-five consonant and about twenty vowel phonemes. Although individual pronunciations may differ, the phonemic habits of the same group or class will be similar. They will make similar use of heterophony. Words not phonetically separated - that is, homophones - may be separated by function or by experiential context. View quote
John Rupert Firth
Meaning... is to be regarded as a complex of contextual relations, and phonetics, grammar, lexicography, and semantics each handles its own components of the complex in its appropriate context. View quote
John Rupert Firth
There is always the danger that the use of traditional grammatical terms with reference to a wide variety of languages may be taken to imply a secret belief in universal grammar. Every analysis of a particular ‘language' must of necessity determine the values of the ad hoc categories to which traditional names are given. What is here being sketched is a general linguistic theory applicable to particular linguistic descriptions, not a theory of universals for general linguistic description. View quote
John Rupert Firth
It is not easy to determine what are the units of speech. Some would say speech sounds, others phonemes... The general opinion is, however, that words, not phones or phonemes or phoneme systems, are the units of speech. View quote
John Rupert Firth
Research into the detailed contextual distribution of sociologically important words, what one might call focal or pivotal words, is only just beginning. View quote
John Rupert Firth
Collocations are actual words in habitual company. A word in a usual collocation stares you in the face just as it is. Colligations cannot be of words as such. Colligations of grammatical categories related in a grammatical structure do not necessarily follow word divisions or even sub-divisions of words. View quote
John Rupert Firth
Speech is our most valuable instrument, because we can make it fit our common lives. We are not born to follow words. Words follow life. It has always been so from the very beginning. In fact, the human larynx and the shape of the passages above it have evolved in harmony with the lives our earliest ancestors lived, first in the trees, and then on the ground. View quote
John Rupert Firth
The complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from context can be taken seriously. View quote
John Rupert Firth
The study of such words as work, labour, trade, employ, occupy, play, leisure, time, hours, means, self-respect, in all their derivatives and compounds in sociologically significant contexts during the last twenty years would be quite enlightening. So would the study of words particularly associated with the dress, occupations, and ambitions of women, or the language of advertising, especially of quackery, entertainments, food, drink, or of political movements and propaganda. View quote
John Rupert Firth
A western scholar must de-europeanize himself, and, in view of the most universal use of English, an Englishman must de-Anglicize himself as well. (John Rupert Firth)
The various structures of sentences in any given language, comprising for example at least two nominal pieces and a verbal piece must be collated, and such categories as voice, mood, affirmative, negative, tense, aspect, gender, number, person and case, if found applicable and valid in descriptive statement, are to be abstracted from, and referred back to the sentence as a whole. View quote
John Rupert Firth
You shall know a word by the company it keeps. View quote
John Rupert Firth
Strictly speaking, the grammatical method of resolving a sentence into parts is nothing but a fanciful procedure; but it is the real fountain of all knowledge, since it led to the invention of writing. View quote
John Rupert Firth