Firth, John Rupert (1890–1960)

English linguist. Influenced by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, he made semantics central to his approach to linguistics and developed the latter's theory of the ‘context of the situation’. Whatever anyone said must be understood in the entire context of the utterance, including such nonlinguistic factors as the status and personal history of the speakers and the social character of the situation.

Firth described typical contexts of situation and ‘typical repetitive events in the social process’; for example, the occurrence of ready-made, socially prescribed utterances such as ‘How do you do?’ He also studied phonological features of speech such as stress, intonation, and nasalization, which, he emphasized, varied considerably in different languages.

Firth was educated at Leeds and spent several years in India, where he became professor of English at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, returning to England 1928. In 1944 he was appointed professor of general linguistics at London University, the first such post in Britain.

Firth wrote two books, Speech 1930 and The Tongues of Men 1937. His most important academic articles are found in Papers in Linguistics 1934–51 1957 and Selected Papers of J R Firth 1968.