In Part 1, MacMahon describes the work of early British linguistics (e.g., the Oxford English Dictionary), and then discusses the development of phonetics, the role of Daniel Jones, his work on the phoneme, and his belief in ‘practical’ phonetics. After describing Alan Gardiner’s work, he focuses on John Rupert Firth, the dominant figure in the early 1930s to late 1950s, who taught mainly at SOAS in London. He developed ‘a contextual theory of meaning,’ based on Malinowski’s ideas, ‘prosodic phonology’ and the idea of several simultaneous systems (polysystematicity). After Firth’s death, Chomsky’s ideas about syntax became dominant, while the term ‘neo-Firthian’ was applied to Michael Halliday and Systemic Linguistics from the early 1960s.

In Part 2, McEnery and Hardie survey neo-Firthian corpus(-driven) linguistics by John McHardy Sinclair and his group, their focus on ‘collocation’ (co-occurrence patterns of words in discourse), and their interest in ‘lexicogrammar.’ For them a corpus is central: theories and analytic generalizations and categories must emerge from corpus data. They impacted lexicography by setting up COBUILD to provide data, ideas, and analyses. Also important is the ‘Idiom Principle’: i.e., in language there are a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases, which has led to two different neo-Firthian theories of language.

This three-authored chapter discusses multiple function-oriented and context-based approaches to grammar, discourse/talk and text, which gave primacy to communication, meaning, actual language use, pragmatic patterning, social and cultural issues, and/or human cognition. (New) theoretical constructs, (various) themes, (different) methodologies and data, came from functional, cognitive, critical, systemic and enunciative linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as speech act theory, pragmatics, ethnography, anthropology, argumentation theory, social semiotics, multimodal studies, sociology, (socio)cultural and critical studies. Language was analyzed as a (spoken and written) tool, a social practice, a collective process and product, whose forms (words, expressions, clauses, sentences/utterances, discourses/text, talk and interaction) are largely explained by their multiple communicative functions, patterns of use, and social, cultural and cognitive correlates.

The topics touched on include: models of communication, situation of interaction, speaker’s vs. hearer’s perspective, referential, social and expressive meaning, iconic principles in language, politeness, social identity and power. Approaches include: speech act theory, Gricean pragmatics, ethnography of communication (Gumperz and Hymes), analysis of oral narrative (Labov), functional grammar (Dik), functional discourse grammar (Rijkhoff), discourse representation theory (Kamp), systemic functional grammar (Halliday), discourse dependent grammar (Hopper and Thompson), emergent grammar (Hopper), grammaticalization, functional-cognitive grammar (Langacker), text linguistics, enunciation theory, and critical discourse analysis.