马林诺夫斯基

1、Malinowskis TheoriesZou NiBrief Introduction Malinowski(18841942) is the first important scholar we should mention when we introduce the London School because his linguistic views greatly influenced J. R. Firth. Malinowski was born in Poland, but he spend most of his time in England. He was Professo

2、r of Anthropology at the London School of Economics since 1927. As an anthropologist, he was much concerned with the functions of human languages and studied languages in a sociocultural context, adopting an approach quite different from those of linguists at his time who were interested in studying

3、 language forms and structures.AchievementsIn 1914, Malinowski went to the Trobriand Islands off eastern New Guinea in the South Pacific Ocean to do field research. There he observed that in this primitive culture the meaning of a word greatly d e p e n d e d u p o n i t s occurrence in a given cont

4、ext, or rather, upon a real language situation.Take the word wood for example. In this culture, the word might be used either to refer to the solid substance of a tree as its English equivalent suggests, or more specifically, to refer to a canoe, which served as useful means of transportation to the

5、se islanders and therefore played an important role in the daily life of this speech community. The second interpretation of this word was culturally specified and could not be easily captured by someone without the relevant culture background.Based on the phenomena of this kind, Malinowski believed

6、 that language “is to be regarded as a mode of action, rather than as a counterpart of thought.” This is different from that of Sapir a n d W h o r f , t w o anthropologists in the North America who also thought of the significance of culture in their study of language use. According to Malinowski,

7、the meaning of an utterance does not come from the ideas of the words comprising it but from its relation to the situational context in which the utterance occurs. There is no way to characterize the meaning of utterances on the basis of internal considerations about the language alone. The meaning

8、of spoken utterances could always be determined by the context of situation. With this understanding, Malinowski distinguished three types of context of situation.1) situation in which speech interrelates with bodily activity;2) narrative situations;3) situations in which a speech is used to fill a

9、speech vacuum“phatic communion”By the first type of situation, Malinowski meant that the meaning of a word is not given by the physical properties of its referent, but by its function. When a savage learns the meaning of a word, the process is not accompanied by explanation but by learning to handle

10、 it. Likewise, a verb, a word for an action, receives its meaning through an active participation in this action.For the second type of situation, Malinowski further distinguished“the situation of the moment of narration” and “the situation referred to by the narrative”. The first case is “made up o

11、f the respective social, intellectual and emotional attitudes of those present”, and the second case derives its meaning from the context referred to.The third type of situation refers to cases of “language used i n f r e e , a i m l e s s , s o c i a l intercourse”. The meaning of utterance in this

12、 case is just the “atmosphere of sociability and t h a t f a c t o f t h e p e r s o n a l communion of these people.” Malinowski called such utterance “phatic communition”.Kula ring 印证功能论最好的例子印证功能论最好的例子库拉圈库拉圈（Kula ring）库拉交易圈是马林诺夫斯基在对特罗布里恩德群岛的研究中发现的一种有趣的交换制度。库拉物品包括两类：白贝手镯和红贝项链，它们都是十分贵重的装饰物品。白贝手镯，沿逆时

13、针方向从一个岛传到另一个岛，红贝项链则沿顺时针方向从一个岛传到另一个岛。可是这两种物品却不具备实质上的功用，但土著却愿意冒着相当的风险进行这种无限循环的交换。在多数外人眼中，这种行为看似不可思议，但马林诺夫斯基却认为这种交换过程倚赖于彼此间的信任这种交换过程倚赖于彼此间的信任，而这信任的原动力其实是为了其他民生物资的交换：由于各岛之间物资有限，彼此间依赖度颇深，库拉圈的交易过程得以建立彼此的相互信赖感，使其他顺带的交易成为可能之事。从库拉圈向外推展，所有的文化项目像家庭、巫术等，都是为了满足社会上的个别需求如果腹、性欲、嬉戏、信仰等。因为如此，所有文化项目彼此互相整合，也不相互违背，整体文化平

14、和而稳定。由此衍伸，马林诺夫斯基以为多数稳定的“野蛮人”文化正快速被西方文化取代。身为人类学家，必须尽快以田野调查将这些文化纪录在民族志之中，才能“抢救”这些“未受污染”的文化身影。因此他强调“抢救人类学”的重要性，并成为他积极送学生到世界各地研究的理由之一。 In his works Coral Gardens and Their Magic published in 1935, Malinowski developed his theories on meaning. First, he prescribed the data for linguistic studies. He argu

15、ed that isolated words are only imagined linguistic facts, and they are the products of advanced analytical procedures of linguistics. Since an utterance may sometimes be an autonomous unit, even the sentence cannot be regarded as reliable data for linguistic studies. The real linguistic data are co

16、mplete utterances in actual uses of languages. Another idea Malinowski put forward in this book is that when a certain sound is used in two different situations, it cannot be called a word, but two words having the same sound, or homonyms. He argued that in order to assign meaning to a sound, one has to study the situations in which it is used. Meaning is not something that exists in sounds, but som