You shall know a word by the company it keeps (Firth 1957)

John Rupert Firth, Studies in Linguistic Analysis

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

1. Using language is one of the forms of human life, and speech is immersed in the immediacy of social intercourse. The human body is that region of the world which is the primary field of human experience but it is continuous with the rest of the world. We are in the world and the world is in us.! Voice-produced sound has its origins in the deep experience of organic existence.

In terms of living, language activity is meaningful.

2. The meaning of language can be stated in linguistic terms if the problem is dispersed by analysis at a series of congruent levels.

3. It is unnecessary to assume any ‘facts’ prior to statement. No fact is merely itself so to speak. There are no brute facts. A fact has to be stated in technical language at each level for each technique and for cach discipline. An isolate is always an abstraction from the language complex which is itself abstracted from the mush of general goings-on. The notion of a mere fact is the product of the abstractive intellect. It is, however, imperative that we remember what we are doing and how we are doing it, and especially at what level or levels of abstraction and of statement. The various linguistic nets get the materials for the statement of the facts in technical language, with the aid of notations and diagrams of various kinds. We then expect to handle similar relevant events in renewal of connection with experience.

4. Attested language text duly recorded is in the focus of attention for the linguist. In dealing with such texts abstracted from the matrix of experience most of the environmental accompaniment in the mush of general goings-on must of necessity be suppressed. Nevertheless the linguist must use his nest to catch and retain on his agenda such selected features or elements of the cultural matrix of the texts as may enable formal contexts of situation to be set up, within which interior relations are recognized and stated. Notional terms are permissible at this level. All language pre-supposes other events linguistic and non-linguistic issuing from each other. The abstraction here called context of situation does not deal with mere ‘ sense' or with thoughts. It is not a description of the environment. It is a set of categories in ordered relations abstracted from the life of man in the flux of events, from personality in society.

5. The first principle of analysis is to distinguish between structure and system. Structure consists of elements in interior syntagmatic relation and these elements have their places in an order of mutual expectancy. The place and order of the categories set up are recognized in structure and find application in renewal of connection with the sources of the abstractions. Systems of commutable terms or units are set up to state the paradigmatic values of the elements.

The statement of structures and systems provides, so to speak, the anatomy and physiology of the texts. It is unnecessary, indeed perhaps inadvisable, to attempt a structural and systemic account of a language as a whole. Any given or selected restricted language, i.e. the language under description is, from the present point of view multi-structural and polysystemic. In fact rather like the human body itself, into which it goes and out of which it comes. As Whitehead said, animals enjoy structure and to be human requires the study of structure.

6. Modes of meaning presuppose modes of experience and when two participants have places in a context of situation, the linguistic statement implies two articulated memories in relation.It is clear we see structure as well as uniqueness in an instance, and an essential relationship to other instances. The inclusion of person and personality recognizes unity, identity, continuity, responsibility and creative effort in communicativeness or diffusion in experience which we may call vox. This is a different notion from what is now often called * communication’. This leads to a theory of reciprocal comprehension, level by level, stage by stage, in a stated series of contexts of situation. There can be no reciprocal comprehension if there is no situation.

7. The meaning of texts is dealt with by a dispersal of analysis at mutually congruent series of levels, beginning with contexts of situation and proceeding through collocation, syntax (including colligation) to phonology and phonetics with or without the use of machines. Stylistics with some notice of the phonaesthetic features, lexicography and the place and use of translation are to be included to complete the spectrum.

8. When an exhaustive scheme of situational contexts cannot be set up, a first approach through a systematic collection of collocations is valuable in both grammatical and lexicographical studies.

9. Every analysis of any particular language must of necessity determine the values of the ad hoc categories to which traditional names are given. The meanings of the categories at the grammatical level are stated in terms of structures and systems. From the point of view of the present theory, it is not considered profitable in linguistics at any rate, to regard them as inner language forms, forms of thought or as mental habits or attitudes,

10. Studies of words in attested collocations emphasize the importance of the piece, phrase, clause, sentence, even of a closely knit group of sentences.

11. The statement of the main features of sound, characteristic of such longer pieces as such, makes new and exacting demands on the phonetic sciences. Similarly, phonological statement is not limited to phonemics. Prosodic categories are being developed in addition to the necessary phonematic analysis and both are keyed to the word or piece as a whole.

12. It follows that morphology as a distinct branch of descriptive linguistics has perhaps been overrated, owing to its very different place and value in historical linguistics.

13. A graphic, phonetic or phonological shape * or * form * may be regarded as an exponent of a category at a level other than its own. The exponents of prosodic and of grammatical categories may be continuous or discontinuous, discrete or cumulative. The general idea underlying such analyses is the mutual expectancy of the parts and the whole, rather than a unidirectional sequence of successive linear segments.

The use made of the phonic material in the phonetic description of exponents does not require that the phonic details variously allotted should be mutually exclusive. There may be some overlap of * symptoms ’ in different syndromes ’.

14. All texts are considered to carry the implication of utterance, all utterance is considered among other things to be in terms of syllabic structure, though no general definition of syllable is either implied or indeed possible.

Syllabic structures are prosodic as such, and further prosodic features may be referred to them. The terms syllabic and syllable can be used as substantives or adjectives if the language of description is English.

16. Both in phonetics and phonology the widest range of notational and formulaic statement is clearly desirable, and so also are experiments with the use of various fonts and sorts of type.

16. The use of machines in linguistic analysis is now established. The present approach prefers to take linguistics into the laboratory rather than to look into laboratories for linguistics.

17. The synopsis presents in outline a general linguistic theory applicable to particular linguistic descriptions, not a theory of universals for general linguistic description. The main purpose is to guide the descriptive analysis of languages, especially restricted languages, and also to provide the necessary principles of synthesis to deal not only with the longer pieces of language, but also with the results of the linguistic studies of the past. It is obvious that a theory of analysis dispersed at a series of levels must require synthesis at each level and congruence of levels. Such a theory requires what has been called the prosodic approach in phonology, since this is congruent with studies of the piece and of the longer text in collocation and extended collocation, of colligation, and finally with syntactical analysis. Grammar and lexicography are both keyed to the statement of the meaning of the restricted language under description by the controlled language of description, supplemented by well considered languages of translation.The business of linguistics is to describe languages, and the main features of the theory, more particularly if applied to restricted languages, should produce the main structural framework for the bridges between different languages and cultures.