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.