La phonesthésie de John Rupert Firth : quand le son fait sens
Résumé
The problems posed by the concept of the phoneme were at the centre of inter- national debates among linguists in the rst half of the 20th century. John Rupert Firth, a key gure in the so-called London school of linguistics, resisted the concept, and aimed to relocate phonological analysis within his phonaesthetic theory, associating meaning with clusters of sounds or letters. This was in line with the practice of 19th and 20th century philologists, and was consistent with Firth’s polysystemic vision of language, grounded in context of situation : the phonestheme as a cluster of sounds echoes the collocation at the lexical level, and the colligation at the grammatical level. Although Firth’s approach never received the scienti c attention he hoped for, it did not remain completely ignored, and would resurface in later work in corpus studies.