Language & Communication, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 259-267, 1989. 0271-5309189 $3.00 + 0.

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Printed in Great Britain. Pergamon Press plc

MALINOWSKI’S ‘CONTEXT OF SITUATION’

GEORGE WOLF

The phrase ‘context of situation’, which found fortune later in the linguistic theory of
J. R. Firth, was coined in 1923 by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, in his
supplement to C. K. Ogden’s and I. A. Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning (referred to
hereinafter in the 8th edn, London, 1946). The title of this supplement is ‘The Problem
of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, and its aim is to sketch an approach to semantics
by basing questions of meaning on an elucidation of fundamental categories revealed by
the study of primitive speech.’
1.
Malinowski’s approach takes as its point of departure a consideration of the problem of
translating primitive languages, languages such as he had encountered in New Guinea and
Melanesia, radically different in structure from English, and expressive of a culture radically
unlike that of Western Europe. M~inowski’s initial point is that the attempt at word-for-
word translation of such languages via dictionary equivalences is not only doomed to failure,
but is indicative of a mistaken concept of meaning and how words have meaning. He gives
the following example of a translation of a native statement concerning an overseas trading
expedition in which several canoes take part in a competitive spirit:
Tasakaulo kaymatana yakida;
We run front-wood ourselves;
kZWOUi0 ovanu tasivila tugine
we paddle in place we turn we see
soda isakaulo ka ‘I(‘uya
companion ours he runs rear-wood
oiuvieki similaveta Piloiu.
behind their sea-arm Pilohr.
(1946: 300-301)

The English series of words sounds like a riddle until Malinowski explains their context,
which reveals such facts as that ‘wood’ means canoe, that the leading sailors are looking
back and perceiving their companions lagging behind on the sea-arm of Pilolu, and further
facts illustrative of the cultural significance of the sailors’ activity. We can thus see how
word-for-word translation based on the dictionary fails in such a case; for we cannot teIl
how to translate a word until, essentially, we understand the entire culture of the people
whose statements we are attempting to translate. This is illustrated even more poignantly
by Malinowski’s recounting of his mistranslation of the Trobriand statement boge laymayse:
At one time I was engaged in making observations on a very interesting transaction [the Wasi] which
took place in a lagoon village of the Trobriands between the coastal fishermen and the inland gardeners.
I had to follow some important preparations in the village and yet I did not want to miss the arrival of
the canoes on the beach. I was busy registering and photographing the proceedings among the huts, when
word went round, ‘they have come already’--boge iayrnayse. I left my work in the village unfinjshed to
rush some quarter of a mile to the shore, in order to find, to my disappointment and mortification, the
canoes far away, punting slowly along towards the beach! Thus I came some ten minutes too soon, just
enough to make me lose my opportunities in the village!

Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Dr S. G. Wolf, Dept of Foreign Languages, University
of New Orleans, Lakefront, New Orleans, LA 70148, U.S.A.

259
260 GEORGE WOLF

It required some time and a much better general grasp of the language before I came to understand
the nature of my mistake and the proper use of words and forms to express the subtleties of temporal
sequence. Thus the root ma which means come, move hither, does not contain the meaning, covered by
our word arrive. Nor does any grammatical determination give it the special and temporal definition, which
we express by, ‘they have come, they have arrived’. The form boge kzymuyse, which I heard on that
memorable morning in the lagoon village, means to a native ‘they have already been moving hither’ and
not ‘they have already come here’ (1946: 303-304).

These considerations lead Malinowski to the conclusion that ‘in a primitive language the
meaning of any simple word is to a very high degree dependent on its context’ (1946: 306).
For Malinowski, several interesting propositions follow from this insight.
First, the concept ‘context of situation’ clarifies the difference between the linguistics
of dead and living languages. Linguists’ almost exclusive study of dead languages-that
is, languages whose forms have been torn out of their cultural context-has fostered the
conception of meaning as something contained in an utterance. This conception, says
Malinowski, is ‘false and futile’. The philologist ‘deals only with remnants of dead
languages’; the ethnographer ‘has to rely on the living reality of spoken language in fluxu’.
Malinowski concludes ‘that the Ethnographer’s perspective is the one relevant and real
for the formation of fundamental linguistic conceptions and for the study of the life of
languages, whereas the Philologist’s point of view is fictitious and irrelevant’ (1946:307).
Second, Malinowski espouses the position of Ogden and Richards that ‘no theory of
meaning can be given without the study of the mechanism of reference’ (1946: 308). Such
a position eliminates the need to consider Mganing as a real entity, contained in a word
or utterance:
For the clear realization of the intimate connection between linguistic interpretation and the analysis of
the culture to which the language belongs, shows convincingly that neither a Word nor its Meaning has
an independent and self-sufficient existence. The Ethnographer’s view of language proves the principle
of Symbolic Relativity as it might be called, that is that words must be treated only as symbols and that
a psychology of symbolic reference must serve as the basis for all science of language (1946: 308-309).

Third, Malinowski offers language, not as a countersign of thought, but as itself a

purposeful activity. It is a means by which persons create ties among themselves, a means
by which they create themselves socially. Utterances do not exist only in an autonomous
linguistic world, but become part of situations, are themselves forms of people’s behavior,
ways of being and acting. Language is not merely a tool used for communication, but is
in a sense communication itself; it is how people relate to each other. Here Malinowski
coins another term, phatic communion, ‘a type of speech in which ties of union are created
by a mere exchange of words’ (1946: 315). Such words ‘fulfill a social function and that
is their principle aim, but they are neither the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they
necessarily arouse reflection in the listener. Once again we may say that language does
not function here as a means of transmission of thought.’
The problems of translating primitive languages lead Malinowski in this way to the
importance of bearing in mind the ‘context of situation’ when approaching problems not
only of primitive meanings, but of meaning in general. Malinowski’s notion of context
of situation is consonant with the notion that if an individual unacquainted with the Kiriwina
language were given equivalents for the individuatable units of the quoted passage above,
he would still be incapable of understanding the passage. In order for such understanding
to be possible, he would need to be given an explanation of how the passage and its parts
are significant in the cultural context in which it is used. An excellent example of such
contextual clarification is the explanation of the phrase tawoulo ovanu ‘we paddle in place’
in the above passage:
 MALINOWSKI’S ‘CONTEXT OF SITUATION’ 261

The quaint expression ‘we paddle in place’ can only be properly understood by reahsing that the word
JM&&Zhas here the function, not of describing what the crew are doing, but of indicating their immediate
proximity to the village of their destination . . .; here the native root rva ‘to move thither’ could not have
been used in ~a~pro~mateiy~ past definite tense to convey the meaning of ‘arrive there’, but a speciaI
root expressing the concrete act of paddling is used to mark the spatial and temporai relations of the Ieading
canoe to the others. The origin of this imagery is obvious. Whenever the natives arrive near the shore
of one of the overseas villages, they have to fold the sail and to use the paddles, since there the water
is deep, even quite close to the shore, and punting impossible. So ‘to paddle’ means ‘to arrive at the overseas
village’. ft may be added that in this expression ‘we paddle in ptace’, the twa remaining words in and
place would have to be retranslated in a free English interpretation by ‘near the village’ (1946: 304-3053.
~~nowski~s conclusion is that ‘language is essentially rooted in the reality of the culture,
the tribal life and customs of a people, and that it cannot be explained without constant
reference to these broader contexts of verbal utterance’.
Malinowski thus explicates the notion of ‘context of situation’, according to which ‘the
study of any language, spoken by a people who Iive under conditions different from our
own and possess a different culture, must be carried out in conjuction with the study of
their culture and of their environment’ (1946: 306).

2.
At this point, however, a certain ambiguity in the approach begins to be detectable; and
if we now glance back over the ground covered thus far, we may notice a slight oddity
in some of the claims that Maiinowski has made. The first of these, as we have seen, is
that there is a ‘difference in scope and method between the linguistics of dead and living
languages’. Ultimately, this appears to reduce to the idea that the philologist has only a
corpus of utterances and uses that only as his context. This is unlike the ethnographer’s
task in that the latter, in addition to having a corpus of native utterances, has access to
the stage of development of a people which gives their speech its foundations and
fundamental characteristics. In other words, the ethnographer sees the fundamental
characteristics of a people’s speech in the process of formation, and thus understands that
speech ‘in its context’; whereas the philologist has, as it were, only husks of meaning to
work with out of which the cultural life has gone,
However, the thought that the ethnographer and the philologist are not engaged in
essentially the same task, that of elucidating utterances by placing them in context, is
somewhat puzzling. For example, taking a line such as Horace’s Exegi monumenturn acre
perennius (‘I have built a monument more lasting than bronze’, Odes 3.30), we might think
it sufficient to account for the fact that this, in its context, is to us a perfectly comprehensible
utterance by pointing out that we know what poetry is, that we have a fair idea of the
role of poetry in Roman society, that we (thanks to the Romans) are familiar with the
workings of metaphor, so that we do not have to waste time wondering whether the poet
was also a builder and had found an extremely hard type of stone, that we know what
the function of both monuments and bronze was in the Roman Empire and why that is
significant in this context, etc. It does not seem that we need to assume, in order to get
enjoyment out of the verse, that we have accounted for every aspect of the culture
‘contextually’. SimilarIy, need Malinowski be certain that he has told us-or knows-
everything relevant about the formative circumstances of the ianguage of the paddlers of
Pilolu in order to elucidate the passage quoted above? For the sense of boge @JLWJWQ
has been conveyed in what would appear to be a satisfactory way, in its context, yet we
have heard nothing about its *stage of development’, ‘in context’.z
262 GEORGE WOLF

Ambiguity in the notion of context is further indicated by Malinowski’s second claim,

noted above, that ‘no theory of meaning can be given without the study of the mechanism
of reference’ (1946: 308). One might have thought that any reference which needed clarifying
would be the reference of an utterance to its context; but if such clarification is feasible,
as Malinowski appears to have shown that it is, then it is unclear why a putative mechanism
must be invoked in addition to that procedure of clarification. The answer is provided in
Malinowski’s section iv, where the full significance of the notion of context is revealed.
The view of language offered in this as well as in the previous sections appears at first
to be one which deliberately shies away from the notion of meaning as a realm of pre-
established entities with an ‘independent and self-sufficient existence’ to which words have
some relation. This is indicated by Malinowski’s assertion that language is not a countersign
of thought. Given the contextual notion of meaning, it is easy to take the emphasis here
to be on ‘countersign’, and to assume that what is meant is that language is not a countersign
of anything. Rather, the focus would be on the speech situation, and meaning might be
taken to involve an elucidation of this situation which rejects the positing of atomistic
meaning-correlates in order to explain the functioning of linguistic forms. This seems amply
supported by Malinowski’s view of language as a ‘mode of action’ rather than as a vehicle
of thought, and on his emphasis on ‘the dependence of the meaning of each word upon
practical experience, and of the structure of each utterance upon the momentary situation
in which it is spoken’. Moreover, the view would seem to be even more strongly supported
by Malinowski’s view of language as ‘phatic communion’, according to which speech is
purely a form of verbal activity with no antecedent or underlying ‘meaning’ except its
own visible nature as external behavior. In Malinowski’s words, ‘Each utterance is an act
serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment or
other. Once more language appears to us in this function not as an instrument of reflection
but as a mode of action.’ (1946: 315).
Given this interpretation of Malinowski’s position, however, it is somewhat surprising
to find, in the next section, dealing with the primitive origins of meaning, in which
Malinowski elaborates on the description of his approach, the following statement
concerning the use of language by infants:
Concentrating our attention for the moment on infantile utterances of this type /e.g. mu, ma, ma] it can
be said that each sound is the expression of some emotional state; that for surrounding people it has a
certain significance; and that it is correlated with the outer situation surrounding and comprising the child’s
organism-a situation which makes the child hungry or afraid or pleased or interested (1946: 318).

Here the above interpretation of Malinowski’s view is shown to be inaccurate by the

introduction of the notion of ‘correlation’-of a sound with an emotional state and with
the child’s physical environment. Malinowski concludes that ‘the significance of sound,
the meaning of an utterance is here identical with the active response to surroundings and
with the natural expression of emotions’. Further on, Malinowski wonders ‘whether and
how far some of the earliest articulated sounds have a “natural” meaning, that is, a meaning
based on some natural connection between sound and object’. From personal observation
Malinowski suggests that ‘the repeated sound ma, ma, ma . . . appears when the child is
dissatisfied generally, when some essential want is not fulfilled or some general discomfort
is oppressing it. The sound attracts the most important object in its surroundings, the
mother, and with her appearance the painful state of mind is remedied. Can it be that
the entry of the sound mama . . . just at the stage when articulate speech begins-with
its emotional significance and its power of bringing the mother to the rescue-has produced
 MALINOWSKI’S ‘CONTEXT OF SITUATION’ 263

in a great number of human languages the root ma for mother?’ (1946: 319-20). And
Malinowski goes further: ‘We find that an arrangement biologically essential to the human
race makes the early articulated words sent forth by children produce the very effect which
those words mean’ (1946: 321).
With regard to our initial formulation of Malinowski’s position, it becomes clear that
the statement just quoted can be taken in more than one sense. The question which then
arises is, ‘In what sense does Malinowski mean “language in context”?’ But when we try
to answer this, we encounter confusing statements such as: ‘In all the child’s experience,
words mean, in so far as they act and not in so far as they make the child understand
or apperceive’ (1946: 321). And the same goes for the primitive native as goes for the infant:
‘A word means to a native the proper use of the thing for which it stands, exactly as an
implement means something when it can be handled and means nothing when no active
experience of it is at hand’ (1946: 321-322). New light begins to dawn on Malinowski’s
exposition here, as we begin to see a distinction between a word (or a tool) in use, and
a word (or a tool) having a (thing’s) use to which it is correlated. The distinction is made
clearer when Malinowski sums up by saying that ‘in the normal use of words the bond
between symbol and referent is more than a mere convention’ (1946: 322).
In these quotations Malinowski speaks of sounds, and of various correlates of those
sounds: emotional states, ‘psychophysiological states’ (1946: 3 18), outer situation, active
responses to surroundings, objects in surroundings, effects, uses of things. From his
discussion has emerged the distinction between the uses of words and the uses of things
for which words stand. Malinowski’s position seems to be that words, like tools, have
meaning only in action. And here is where the confusion about the nature of Malinowski’s
view of language may arise. He has said that only words in action, as actively used in actual
speech situations, have meaning. Yet the nature of that meaning is not now as it first
appeared. For it turns out that in the process of being used, words have, in Malinowski’s
view, an active correlation with the momentary psycho-physiological state of the speaker
and with the salient features of the immediate surroundings. In this sense Malinowski takes
some kind of correlation of words with environmental features to be natural. The natural
bond between word and environmental feature is forged by use; for it is the natural purpose
of words-it is their nature-to express those features of the environment which need
expressing: the intention to hammer a nail, hunger, the need for mother-or mother herself.
Given the above distinction, Malinowski’s earlier strictures against seeing language
primarily as a vehicle for expressing thoughts are revealed in a new light. For now it appears
that Malinowski is not so much opposed tout court to the notion of correlating words with
non-verbal entities or ‘states’, as he is opposed simply to emphasizing an exclusively
intellectual function of language. According to Malinowski’s preferred emphasis, rather
than meaning-i.e. correlating to-thoughts, words mean-i.e. correlate to-situations
of utterance. We can now also better understand the difference between our original
construal of Malinowski’s position as being that a word’s meaning is revealed by examining
the way it is used, and the purport of Malinowski’s statement that ‘The real knowledge
of a word comes through the practice of appropriately using it within a certain situation’
(1946: 325). For Malinowski does not mean that the meanings of words are explained by
examining how and why speakers fit those words into their discourse; he means rather
that ‘there can be no definition of a word without the reality it means being present’ (1946:
325). Thus meaning for Malinowski turns out to be not, strictly speaking, how a word
264 GEORGE WOLF

is used, but rather that with which a word, when in use, is correlated. And this rehabilitates
the correlate as a legitimate model for meaning.

3.
Malinowski reinforces his picture of language in his final section, in which he discusses
the question of how languages have acquired their structures. For Malinowski, ‘all languages
show, in spite of great divergencies, a certain fundamental agreement in structure and means
of grammatical expression’ (1946: 327). The goal, then, is to investigate the roots of this
structure in order to discover how it has come into being. The conclusion is that the
correlations which we have seen in the above paragraphs between language and the uses
to which it is put have left their traces in linguistic structure. We discover that there are
‘real categories’ on which grammatical divisions are based, categories derived from primitive
(or infantile) practical experience, and that these categories are reflected in the structure
of language:
Language in its structure mirrors the real categories derived from practical attitudes of the child and of
primitive or natural man to the surrounding world. The grammatical categories with all their peculiarities,
exceptions, and refractory insubordination to rule, are the reflection of the makeshift, unsystematic, practical
outlook imposed by man’s struggle for existence in the widest sense of this word. It would be futile to
hope that we might be able to reconstruct exactly this pragmatic world vision of the primitive, the savage
or the child, or to trace in detail its correlation to grammar. But a broad outline and a general correspondence
can be found; and the realization of this frees us anyhow from logical shackles and grammatical barrenness
(1946: 327-328).

Malinowski illustrates the development of primitive categories by the examples of the

emergence of the parts of speech. For example, the practical nature of the world and the
requirements of the child or the native are responsible for the emergence of a category
of persons and personified things. Remarkably, it appears that this category roughly
corresponds to that of ‘substance’, and, even more remarkably, to the sense of ‘substance’
which is conveyed by Aristotle’s ousia. The world of the infant and the savage is the ‘rough,
uncouth matrix out of which the various conceptions of substance could be evolved’ (1946:
332). Parallel to this development come the beginnings of the articulation of sound; and
articulated sounds then being available, the crude concept of substance could at last be
signified by some of those sounds. Thus emerges the noun. Verbs emerge similarly as sounds
applied to the crude concept of ‘action’ which also develops naturally out of the primitive
pragmatic situation; and primitive situational correlates might be found as well for
pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, cases, declensions, and conjugations. The
method of procedure, according to Malinowski, is to deal ‘on the one hand with the
Semantic Matter-to-be-Expressed and on the other with structural features of Language,
to explain these latter by a reference to real facts of primitive human nature’ (1946: 335).
The coherences and ambiguities of Malinowski’s view of language fall finally into place
here with the exposition of the development of the primitive categories, common, as he
has intimated, to all languages at a deep level. Confronted at the outset of his researches
with ‘the problem of meaning in primative languages’, Malinowski discovered that the
meanings of native words were not given by atomistic dictionary equivalences. The reason
for this was that it was impossible to know how a word was understood, and thus to know
its meaning, except by reference to the living cultural context in which it was used in an
utterance. This discovery led to the notion of ‘context of situation’. However, once the
‘context of situation’ asserted itself as necessary to the elucidation of the meanings of words,
it would be clear that, unless a people had a fixed and finite set of things to say in their
 MALINOWSKI’S ‘CONTEXT OF SITUATION’ 265

daily activities, then the number of things they said and the contexts they said them in
would be both infinite and indeterminate-indeterminate in the sense that it would be
impossible to predict what a given context would be. The Wasi or the paddling overseas
might present highly uniform patterns of speech and behaviour; but clearly much of
native-and certainly of modern civilized-life would manifest itself in a good number
of daily situations, and hence contexts and utterances, which had never been encountered
before in a given form. Thus the notion ‘context of situation’ could be taken as appearing
to lead to a notion of word-meaning as indeterminate.
But how, the question would be, could word-meanings be indeterminate if they were
relative to a cultural context which had its place in a culture which was well known and
had been for all intents and purposes fully analyzed? And with this question, tension would
be capable of arising in the theory due in large part to ambiguity in the notion of ‘context’.
Such tension would be heightened by the contrast between Malinowski’s superb examples
of how the meaning of a word or phrase could be elucidated by describing how it was
used in its context, and the fact that this method of describing use in context did not seem
to entail that there were any necessary features of the context which determined the meanings
of those words and phrases once and for all. Yet that those meanings should be taken
as not so determined would be intolerable, since the theory of ‘context of situation’ appeared
to entail that if the meaning of a word were relative to its total cultural context, and if
the total cultural context had been fully analyzed, then the word’s meaning should be
completely determinate.
What was needed, then, was a way to guarantee that a word’s meaning was relative to
the second sense of ‘context’, that of ‘total (fully analyzable) cultural context’. The way
found was the postulating of the ‘mechanism of reference’ and the development of primitive
categories. For if primitive categories had been naturally formed in primitive speech
situations, and if those categories henceforth underlay the language used by natives (their
individual infant speech situations coinciding in nature with the speech situations of the
infancy of the race as a whole), and if those categories underlay the ‘culture’ as well, then
a natural link could be taken to have been made between the categories of culture by
reference to which word-meanings, via the theory of ‘context of situation’, were defined,
and the words and utterances themselves. Hence those word-meanings were guaranteed
by an isomorphism of language and culture, and the problem of indeterminacy could be
taken as solved.

4.
Unfortunately, the possibility of the success of this programme had been precluded by
the ambiguity of Malinowski’s notion of ‘context’. For if the meaning of a word were
explainable by its context, as Malinowski had shown that it was, and if the use of a word
had no immediate contextual connection (i.e. in this first sense of ‘context’) to the primitive
circumstances which had given the language meanings in the beginning-which Mahnowski’s
explications seemed to show also to be the case-then those primitive meanings could be
taken as strictly irrelevant to a present use of an expression. That is to say, an expression
might have derived its ‘natural’ meaning from a primitive situation, but the very possibility
of giving meanings of that expression without reference to that particular primitive ‘context’
(which would very likely now be unknowable anyway), showed that a theory of primitive
meanings was unnecessary to the very approach it was designed ultimately to explain: the
approach to meaning via ‘context of situation’.
266 GEORGE WOLF

In brief, there are two theories of meaning in ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive
Languages’; and this is the result of an ambiguous notion of context. In one sense, ‘context’
can be taken to mean immediate situational context. In this sense, a word’s meaning can
be elucidated by describing how it is being used in that immediate context. The second
sense of ‘context’ is the sense in which ‘the culture’ is taken as a determinate unity fully
describable in terms, for example, of categories. In this sense of context, a word’s meaning
can be elucidated by revealing its connection to the ‘cultural’ context. The first sense of
context does not require a word’s meaning to be fully determinate, since it does not entail
that there are only a finite number of contexts of fixed nature within which a word can
be used. The second sense of context does require a word’s meaning to be fully determinate,
since it is defined relative to the whole culture, and the nature of this whole culture has
been fully determined. Malinowski opted, in a sense, for both notions of ‘context’. For
in his examples of how a word’s meaning could be elucidated in context, he used the sense
of ‘context’ according to which the assumption that contexts were finite and determinate
was not necessary to the description: tot contextus, quot explicationes. At the same time,
however, he felt the need to guarantee that word-meanings had a fixed culture-relative
character. He did this by ‘contextualizing’ primitive meaning-situations within a set of
cultural activities and practical pursuits. All of these ‘pragmatic aspects’ would clearly form
part of, and indeed constitute, ‘the culture’. Within the context of these primitive pragmatic
situations words would come to have ‘primitive meanings’. That is, they would fuse, as
it were, permanently with salient experiential correlates of those primitive situations, such
salient correlates being the primitive meanings of the words. Thus would the categories
of the language be formed. The result was that if the primitive situations constituted the
culture, and if those primitive situations provided, indeed were, the ultimate meanings of
the words and the categories-the nature-of the language, then the meanings of words
were guaranteed to have, through all the vicissitudes of the cultural and linguistic history
of a people, a predetermined connection to the fundamental categories of the culture. And
the method of ‘contextualization’ would simply reveal those fundamental categories
underneath the accretions due to ‘the constant action of metaphor, of generalisation,
analogy and abstraction’ which ‘obliterate the boundary lines, thus allowing words and
roots to move freely over the whole field of language’ (1946: 335-336). However, it was
in the end impossible to reconcile one sense of ‘context’ with the other, and Malinowski
ended up with two contradictory theories of meaning. For if meanings were relative to
the first sense of ‘context’, then there was simply no need for ultimate categories if ultimate
categories were irrelevant to the immediate context. If, on the other hand, meanings were
relative to the second sense of ‘context’, then contextualization would in effect ultimately
ignore immediate context as obscuring rather than elucidating the meanings of words.
But could these senses of ‘context’ both stand? Malinowski’s explication of the phrase
boge laymayse was a brilliant demonstration of the viability of the first sense of context.
It revealed the mistake of the translation ‘They have come already’, and elucidated the
meaning of the phrase by explaining that it was used when the natives on shore perceived
the canoers punting. This constituted as full as necessary a contextualization of the phrase.
Moreover, it showed that boge laymayse did not have a fixed relation to certain definite
features of an extra-linguistic reality, but that what would appear to be its ‘linguistically’
predictable meaning was in fact relative to varying circumstances and participants in those
circumstances. However, it is at this point that Malinowski sidestepped the implications
of his own contextual theory. For instead of conceding the semantic indeterminacy which
 MALINOWSKI’S ‘CONTEXT OF SITUATION’ 267

was in fact implied by his theory, he opted instead for attaching the phrase boge laymayse
merely to a different determinate correlate, which was the English phrase ‘They have already
been moving hither’. It was the second sense of ‘context’ which appeared to require that
boge laymayse be attached to something of a determinate nature. Thus Malinowski retained
the now outdated notion that ‘They have already been moving hither’, like the original
‘mistaken’ translation, itself possessed a definite meaning. Yet it was precisely this
assumption which was put into question by the contextual theory. That is, neither ‘They
have already been moving hither’ nor ‘They have already come here’ has an atomistic
dictionary-equivalence meaning. Thus, the latter may still be a perfectly good translation
of boge laymayse; it is just that we must now take the English phrase itself in a different
sense. The result for both Kiriwina and English phrases is that their meanings are accounted
for by the contextual theory, which in effect precludes the attaching of them to fixed factors
by means of which they may be given fixed meanings. And this in turn precludes any role
in the theory for the second sense of ‘context’.
The result is that the second sense of ‘context’ must be abandoned. The consequence
of doing so is the clearing of the field for the remainder of Malinowski’s theory: ‘phatic
communion’, and the determination of meaning by context. In fact, it was this part of
the theory which was truly new, and which was capable of freeing linguistic theory from
‘logical shackles and grammatical barrenness’. Partly because of the ambiguity of
Malinowski’s discussion of ‘context’, it has not yet done so; and this is what makes trying
to make sense of that discussion interesting today. And while the disregard of the theory
by modern linguistics is puzzling, we may be grateful for the clarity of the programme,
and for the influence in some quarters which it enjoyed, both of which make further
development along its lines a compelling prospect.

NOTES

‘The present article touches on some of the same topics as J. Szymura’s ‘Bronislaw Malinowski’s “Ethnographic
Theory of Language” ‘, in R. Harris (ed.), Linguistic Thought in England 1914-1945, London, 1988, pp. 106-3 1,
although it makes a separate point (and was written before Szymura’s chapter was available). The argument
presented herein would suggest that Szymura’s statement that ‘In subordinating linguistic meaning to the functions
of speech, Malinowski did not grasp the autonomy of a linguistic system, which is governed by its own laws’
(p. 130) misses a crucial conflict in Malinowski’s thinking.
2This weakness in Malinowski’s position concerning a difference in nature between ‘living’ and ‘dead’ languages
was later rectified by him in the first chapter of his Coral Gardens and their Mugic (1935), where he broadened
the application of his theory to all uses of language; see R. H. Robins, ‘Malinowski, Firth, and the “Context
of Situation” ‘, in E. Ardener (ed.), Social Anthropology and Language, London, 1971, p. 41.