The Itroduction to The London School.docVIP

The Introduction to The London School The London School, as we know, is a main branch of modern linguistics, also known as systemic linguistics and functional linguistics, for the leading representatives, such as Firth, Malinowski and Halliday, all stress the importance of situation and the system aspect of language. In this article, I aim to introduce something about London school, the main representatives and their well-known theories. First, I’d like to show you Malinowski, a renowned anthropologist, and his theories. The most important aspect of his theorizing, as distinct from his purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language. He asserts that language is to be regarded as a mode of action, rather than as a counterpart of thought. For him, the meaning of an utterance does not come from the ideas of the words comprising it but from its relation to the situational context in which the utterance occurs, which is based on two observations, first, the fact that there is no writing in primitive society, and language has only one type of use. Second , the way children learn languages. Moreover he believes that utterances and situations re bound up, inextricably with each other and the context of situation is indispensable for the understanding of the words, which, always determines the meaning of utterances. By him, the context of situation falls into three types: narrative situations, situations in which speech interrelates with bodily activity, which means the meaning of a word is given by its function, rather than by the physical properties of its referent. and situation in which speech is used to fill a speech vacuum which asserts that the meaning of language comes from the atmosphere of sociability and the fact of personal communion of these people. In 1935, Malinowski developed his theories on meaning and put forward two points, first, he prescribed the data for linguistic studies, holding that isolated w