The London School

Linguistic description evolves a standard language since eleventh century.
In the sixteenth century the practical linguistic was flourished in England.

Practical Linguistics

Orthoepy- it is the codification and teaching the correct pronunciation.
lexicography- it is the invention of shorthand systems, spelling reform, and the creation of artificial ‘philosophical languages.’
They induce in their practitioners a considerable degree of sophistication about matters linguistics.

Phonetics

Henry Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the working of the vocal organs. He was concerned with the systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform.

Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized in an ideal system of orthography.

Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of through training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech- sound. 

He invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels.

Linguistics 

J.R. Firth turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject. Firth said that the phonology of a language consist of a number of system of alternative possibilities which come into play at different points in phonological unit such a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.

A phonemic transcription, represent a fully consistent application of the particular principles of orthography on which European alphabetic scripts happen to be more or less accurately based. 

Firth´s theory allows for an unlimited variety of systems, the more distinct systems a given description recognizes the more complex that description will be.

Languages do not display too great a variety of phonological ‘systems’: thus we do not on the whole find languages with quite different kinds and numbers of consonants before each distintic vowel.

Trubetzkoy assumes that the range of sounds found in the special neutralizing environment will be related in a regular way to the range found in other environments.

School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas)

It was founded in 1916.
London linguistics was a brand of linguistics in which theorizing was controlled by healthy familiarity with realities of alien tongues.

A Firthian phonologycal analysis recognizes a number of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units.

The terminological distinction between ‘prosodies’ and ‘phonematic units’ could as well be thought of as ‘prosodies’ that happen to be only one segment long.

In Firthian terms the syllable plays an essential role as the domain of a large number of prosodies.

Like the polysystemic principle, prosodic analysis is a good dissolvent of pseudoquestions, in this case questions about the direction of dependencies which are in fact mutual.

The concept of the prosodic unit in phonology seems, so attractive and natural that it is surprising to find that it is not more widespread. In fact just one American Descriptivists, Zellig Harris, did use a similar notion; but Harris’s ‘long components’ though similar to Firth’s prosodies, are distinct and theoretically less attractive. 

It is a characteristic of the Firthian approach to be much more concerned with the ‘systems’ of choices between alternatives which occur in a language than with the details of how particular alternatives are realized.

Thus Henderson makes a formal statement of the possible combinations of her Vietnamese prosodies, but she discusses the phonetic realization of the prosodies informally, tacitly suggesting that aspect of her exposition is not part of the analysis proper. 

Nowhere in Chomsky and Halle’s Sound pattern of English will one find a statement of the pattern of possible phonological shapes of English syllables or words.
Firth insisted that sound and meaning in language were more directly related that they are ussually taken to be.

For Firth, a phonology was a structure of system of choices were systems of meaning.

Firth meant that each individual choice point in grammar had its own individual semantic correlates, and this just cannot be taken seriously.
¢Linguistics of the London School have done much more work on the analysis of intonation that have Americans of any camp and the Brithis work.

To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we muste exmine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski, professor of Anthropology at the London School.

The most important aspect of Malinowski´s theorizing, as distinct for his purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language.

For Malinowski, to think of language as a ‘means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener’ was a myth: to speak, particulary in a primitive culture, is not to tell but to do.
Word are tools, and the ‘meaning’ of a tool is its use.

Firth accepted Malinowski’s viwe of language. Firth uses the word ‘meaning’, wich occurs frequently in his writings, in rather bizarre ways. 

Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentencesthat one’s language makes available
To make this clearer, we may contrast the systemic approach with Chomsky´s approach to grammar. A Chomskyan grammar defines the class of well-formed senteces in a language by providing a set of rules for rewriting symbols as other symbols.