馬林諾夫斯基

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 “l(fā)anguage 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 印證功能論最好的例子印證功能論最好的例子庫拉圈庫拉圈（Kula ring）庫拉交易圈是馬林諾夫斯基在對特羅布里恩德群島的研究中發(fā)現(xiàn)的一種有趣的交換制度。庫拉物品包括兩類：白貝手鐲和紅貝項(xiàng)鏈，它們都是十分貴重的裝飾物品。白貝手鐲，沿逆時(shí)

13、針方向從一個(gè)島傳到另一個(gè)島，紅貝項(xiàng)鏈則沿順時(shí)針方向從一個(gè)島傳到另一個(gè)島?？墒沁@兩種物品卻不具備實(shí)質(zhì)上的功用，但土著卻愿意冒著相當(dāng)?shù)娘L(fēng)險(xiǎn)進(jìn)行這種無限循環(huán)的交換。在多數(shù)外人眼中，這種行為看似不可思議，但馬林諾夫斯基卻認(rèn)為這種交換過程倚賴于彼此間的信任這種交換過程倚賴于彼此間的信任，而這信任的原動(dòng)力其實(shí)是為了其他民生物資的交換：由于各島之間物資有限，彼此間依賴度頗深，庫拉圈的交易過程得以建立彼此的相互信賴感，使其他順帶的交易成為可能之事。從庫拉圈向外推展，所有的文化項(xiàng)目像家庭、巫術(shù)等，都是為了滿足社會上的個(gè)別需求如果腹、性欲、嬉戲、信仰等。因?yàn)槿绱?，所有文化?xiàng)目彼此互相整合，也不相互違背，整體文化平

14、和而穩(wěn)定。由此衍伸，馬林諾夫斯基以為多數(shù)穩(wěn)定的“野蠻人”文化正快速被西方文化取代。身為人類學(xué)家，必須盡快以田野調(diào)查將這些文化紀(jì)錄在民族志之中，才能“搶救”這些“未受污染”的文化身影。因此他強(qiáng)調(diào)“搶救人類學(xué)”的重要性，并成為他積極送學(xué)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