L212 Firthian Prosodic Analysis.
Lecture 3.
Polysystems and some Terminology.
Polysystems
Main idea: treat language not as “un système où tout se tient” (Meillet, quoted in Firth 1948), but as a set of interacting smaller systems. 
Typical systems: loan words; names; morphosyntactic classes (eg. noun vs. verb; function words vs. content words); monosyllables vs. disyllables; syllable initial vs. syllable final; harmonising vs. non-harmonising.
Comparability of systems: Firth’s notion of systemic value. The value of a term in a system is determined by the number of contrastive terms. eg. “plural” in a system with {singular, plural} has a different value from “plural” in {singular, dual, plural}. Same for phonological categories: w in the system {w y h} doesn’t have the same value as in {w y}. Systems are comparable only if they contain the same number of items. Likewise, w in a 3-term system isn’t the same as w in a 2-term system.
Delicacy
This term comes from Halliday, a student of Firth’s and his greatest disciple (unfortunately for us a syntactician more than a phonologist!). Basic idea: some terms are subsumed by others. It’s related to the idea of underspecification in modern phonology, but it has a wider application: statements can be made with varying degrees of delicacy, and we can omit detail unnecessary to our purpose by being less delicate (less specific). For example, for English we might state:

Advantages of polysystematicity:
• things that seem irregular can be made to be regular by establishing more than one system, each subsystem being internally consistent and regular, but each subsystem different: absence of plosion syllable-finally in Thai is because plosivity is not part of the syllable-final system (Henderson 1949); the regularities are of another kind (expressed in the symmetry of the syllable-initial and syllable-final phonematic system).
• polysystematicity is one way of stating constraints: eg. “the syllable initial system contains A B C, the syllable final system A and C”: B doesn’t appear syllable intitially because it is a different system, and we shouldn’t expect different systems to be the same (by definition!). This is obviously useful for eg. different inflexional paradigms: French il achète, il finit, il vend have different endings because they’re in different systems;
Disadvantages of polysystematicity: Lack of clear constraints on polysytems: how many systems are there? what kinds of things can systems be? How similar are they? Eg. Henderson (1951) says that she needs “upwards of a dozen phonological systems and subsystems”. Note that there’s no lower limit, only an upper one. Can this really give us “economy of statement”? Where do we stop? Can two lexical items form a system? If so, what are the implications? Risk: if we take notions of comparability of systems seriously, and if we have lots of small systems, we might lose comparability. There needs to be some statement about what holds things together: what makes all these systems into a language?
Some example texts. (Very selective!) 
In fact, any FPA paper will illustrate polysystems. These papers show a variety of applications of polysystemic statement.
Henderson 1951
Identifies for Siamese a primary system (for native words) and ten “fragmentary systems”. To these ten fragmentary systems belong loan words and “phonæsthetic” or exclamatory words. Two systems are mainly for Sanskritic loans; three mostly for Chinese, and the other systems for European loans. (There is overlap between the systems however.) NB: loans can also be assimilated into the primary system. Similar findings for Cambodian.
Examples (from Siamese):
Èco˘k	joke	long vowel + stop not associated with primary system
Èkçf	golf	native words don’t end in fricatives
=phu´/	noise of a stick snapping	there are no glottalised diphthongs in the primary system
Conclusion: It is possible to set up a number of “more or less complete phonological systems” (=?) “of which one may be regarded as primary”.
Carnochan 1961 Pitch, Tone and Intonation in Igbo.
Sets up two Tone systems for verbs; stresses the need to state Tone in relation to grammatical categories. The Tone systems simply describe patterns of behaviour and are called Group 1 and Group 2, rather than High Tone Verbs and Low Tone Verbs. This obviates the need for saying that “a high tone verb becomes low” when the tone of a Group 1 verb could be either high or low (depending on structure).
Scott 1957 Sea Dayak
Like many prosodic analysts, he sets up different systems of contrast at different places in the structure (albeit for orthography). Note the interplay between systems and structures, and phonetic interpretation.  So eg. the phonetic interpretation of a in column 8 is different when followed by something in column 9 (ie. a sylalble-final consonant) than when it is followed by q, which forms a digraph, aq which appears in column 8. The letter e has different phonetic interpretations depending on the system it’s in. The compulsory system (column 8) contains the largest number of terms. Is this a universal fact about systems of contrast? 
 Notes on Firthian terminology.
One of the main reasons FPA is not a theory is that it lacks concrete definitions for many of its concepts (as you have already noticed). Two responses: never mind, just get on with making sense of the analysis , or try to formalise the terminology and notation to turn it into something more like a testable theory. (If you can’t say explicity what the theoretical predictions are, how can you test your theory against reality?)
I have nothing to say on the standardization of terminology nor do I consider nomenclature in itself of primary importance… But we must have orderly language to discuss language…
Firth (1956b: 120).
If we say things in different ways, we are saying different things.
From notes taken by Eugénie Henderson from a lecture course by Eileen Whitley (Whitley ms.).
Readers of the writings of Firth and his school often complain about the lack of firm definitions of such terms as ‘prosody’, ‘phonematic unit’ and the like. This is to misunderstand Firth’s ad hoc approach. It is no accident that the reader will look in vain in Firth’s writings for definitions, step-by-step discovery procedures, or rules about how to write rules. There is no doubt however, that the lack of a generally agreed system of phonological notation in the Firthian literature is a serious deterrent to the reader and has meant that Firth’s views on language have not reached as wide a public as they deserved. The danger that Firth was trying, too strenuously perhaps, to avoid was that an over-rigid formalism might succeed in stifling the linguist’s freedom to look at language in new and productive ways in the never-ending search for “truth”. This danger is with us still.
Henderson (1987: 68)
Piece
A combination of words. Not defined more closely. NP, PP, VP, etc. could all be treated as ‘pieces’. Carnochan (1957) uses ‘nominal piece’ to describe structures applying to nouns only, and Carnochan (1960) uses ‘verbal piece’ (Pr+V) as the domain of vowel harmony in his study of Igbo:
Generalised phonological formula: R/L[(A)w (CVA)y/w]
o siE	he cooks	ç sea	he says
o goo	he buys	ç bçç	he cuts up
‘Piece’ is also frequently used in a different sense, to refer to the domain of some phonological characteristic. For example, Sprigg (1961, Vowel Harmony in Lhasa Tibetan) refers to the Closure Piece: a sequence of two syllables for which the Closure system (close-open contrast for vowel harmony) is relevant:
(When the Closure piece contains the particles pas or rog)
	First Syllable	Second Syllable
Close	i I y u U F	e o
Open	e O E ç Å a A	E ç
Question (I have no answer!): what is the relation between the systems we set up and the pieces we set up? could ‘piece’ be formalised? or should we rejoice in its vagueness (and therefore its flexibility of use!)?