John Rupert Firth

John Rupert Firth was a British linguist who in 1944 became the first professor of general linguistics in Britain, holding the position at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and is regarded as the founder of what became known as the London School of linguistics. Firth developed the concept of context of situation, arguing that meaning in language could only be properly analyzed in relation to the full social and situational context in which an utterance occurs, rather than treated as a fixed property of words or sentences in isolation. Firth is also credited with founding collocation as a concept in linguistic analysis, summarized in his own frequently quoted formulation that a word can be known by the company it keeps, an idea that anticipated later corpus-based approaches to meaning. Firth trained a generation of British linguists during his time at SOAS and his ideas on context and meaning influenced the subsequent development of systemic functional linguistics.