John Rupert Firth commonly known as J. R. Firth, was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 linguist. He was Professor of English at the University of the Punjab

University of the Punjab

University of the Punjab , colloquially known as Punjab University, is located in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. The University of the Punjab is the oldest and biggest University of Pakistan. The University of the Punjab was formally established with the convening of the first meeting of its...

 from 1919-1928. He then worked in the phonetics department of University College London

University College London

University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...

 before moving to the School of Oriental and African Studies

School of Oriental and African Studies

The School of Oriental and African Studies is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the University of London...

, where he became Professor of General Linguistics, a position he held until his retirement in 1956.
His work on prosody

Prosody (linguistics)

In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...

, which he emphasised at the expense of the phonemic principle

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

, prefigured later work in autosegmental phonology

Autosegmental phonology

Autosegmental phonology is the name of a framework of phonological analysis proposed by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....

.