- Read the follownig paper,
- Make a power point presentation on the paper as your summary.
MALINOWSKI’S CONTEXTUAL MEANING AND PRAGMATIC MEANING
I. INTRODUCTION
When first I read J. K. Rowling’s three-year-bestseller book ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’, I found out that Rowling’s way to begin her story is similar with the one found in Peter Pan, The Indian in the Cupboard, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Each book begins with the real world and moves to the fantasy, and then returns to the real world. There is a kind of a classic fantasy pattern in those five books. It is worth noting that the books have different authors, settings, plots, and even themes. Is it a coincidence? Surprisingly, the answer is no. It is not a coincidence. Lévi-Strauss (Widdowson, 1997; 73) argues that all myths—stories and other cultural products are considered myths—have structural pattern which gives the myths meanings. He believes that this linguistic model will uncover the basic structure of the human mind—the structure, which governs the way human beings shape all their institutions, artifacts and forms of knowledge. (pp. 73-74) To Lévi-Strauss, the structures of myth point to the structures of human mind common to all people—that is, to the way all human beings think. Myth thus becomes a language—a universal narrative mode that transcends cultural or temporal barriers and speaks to all people, in the process tapping deep reservoirs of feeling and experience. (Guerin, L. Wilfred & Friends; 1992: 336)
Lévi-Strauss, like other structuralists, agrees that literature has a special relationship with language: it draws attention to the very nature and specific properties of language. (Widdowson, 1997; 72) According to Jan Mukarovsky, the work of art is perceived as such only against a more general background of signification. In Saussure’s view, words are not symbols which correspond to referents, but rather are ‘signs’ which are made up of two parts: a mark, either written or spoken, called a ‘signifier’, and a concept—what is thought when a mark is made—called a ‘signified’. (p. 67 – 68)
Language is one among many sign-systems. The science of such system is called ‘semiotic’. (p. 68). Within semiotics, Morris (Levinson, C. Stephen, 1983: 1) distinguished three distinct branches of inquiry: syntactics, being the study of ‘the formal relation of signs to one another’, semantics, the study of ‘the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable’, and pragmatics, the study of ‘the relation of signs to interpreters’.
Talking about pragmatics means talking about meanings of utterances which cannot be accounted for by straightforward reference to the truth conditions of the sentences uttered. (Qazdar in Levinson, 1983; 12) It means that pragmatics is concerned with the study of the aspects of meaning not covered in semantics. Another definition of pragmatics says that pragmatics is the study of the relations between language and context that are basic to an account of language understanding. Poedjosudarmo differentiates meanings into two types of meanings. One is contrastive meaning and the other is contextual meaning. To obtain the meaning of utterances, Malinowski argues that one need merely correlate the utterances with the context of concurrent human activity.
In this paper, the discussion will mainly focus on meanings, which Malinowski concerns and which pragmatics concerns. I am interested in talking about this simply because both Malinowski and pragmatics correlate meanings to contexts. I would like to find out if both of their views on meaning have relation. This paper will also explicate (1) the principles of Malinowski’s view on meanings, (2) the definitions of pragmatics and the aspects of meaning in pragmatics.
II. DISCUSSION
In this section, I will describe some theories related to the main focus of this paper. They are (1) the principles of Malinowski’s view on meanings, (2) the definitions of pragmatics and the aspects of meaning in pragmatics. Based on these theories, the paper will analyze the relation between Malinowski’s contextual meaning and pragmatic meaning.
a. Malinowski’s view on meanings
Bronislaw Malinowski is an anthropologist. He did a lot of research in ethnographical fields. He was the only anthropologist who had had an abiding interest in language. (Langendoen, D. Terence, 1968; 2) Malinowski’s view on language are reflected on his ethnographical findings summed up in: ‘Classificatory Particles’ (1920), ‘Argonauts of the Western Pacific’ (1922), ‘The Problem of Meaning’ (1923), and ‘Coral Garden and Their Magic’ (1935).
1. ‘Classificatory Particles’ (1920)
Throughout the paper, Malinowski asserted that there is a need for the development of a theory of semantics that will enable researchers in linguistics to probe more deeply into language structure. He argued that a semantic theory should be connected closely with ethnographic theory, since an understanding of what people mean by what they say depends upon what their culture is (p. 7). Since Malinowski’s understanding of universal grammar was traditional school grammar, he proposed that a semantic theory must provide a basis for the definition of the traditional parts of speech, their ‘modification’ like cases and tenses, and certain grammatical relations like subject and predicate.
Malinowski added that the definition of categories and relations of universal grammar should take into account the semantic circumstances provided by the cultural environment in which the language is spoken (p 10). Malinowski simply argued that the cultural importance of bunches of fruit in Kiriwina accounts for the existence of a special classificatory particle for each of several nouns designating bunches of fruit in the language. Similarly, there is a classificatory particle used only with a noun designating batches of fish, since batches of fish play an important role in the economic life of the island (p 11).
2. ‘Argonauts of the Western Pacific’ (1922)
Malinowski had little to say about language in Argonauts of the Western Pacific. He remarked that the language of magical texts is not like ordinary language. Magical style does not serve to communicate ideas from one person to another but is an instrument serving special purposes. It is for the exercise of man’s specific power over things and its meaning can be understood only in correlation to this aim (p. 15).
Malinowski seemed to believe that the meaning of magical text could be arrived at through rules, which are different from the rules governing the meaning of ordinary discourse. In sentences of ordinary discourse, the meaning is arrived at by concatenation of the meanings of the elements in the sentences. He added that the order of words in sentences reflects the order of ideas in the mind. The semantic properties of magical texts are exceptional.
3. ‘The Problem of Meaning’ (1923)
In this article, Malinowski’s linguistic views are radically different. He exactly reversed his assertion in Argonauts of the Western Pacific that the language of magic is a kind of a language use. In this article he considered that the language of magic is an exemplification of the basic and primary use of language, and that the use of language to communicate ideas is special or derivative.
An utterance receives its meaning not from a logical concatenation of the ideas expressed by the words comprising it but from its relation to the situational context in which it occurs (p. 16). Utterances and situation are bound up with each other and the context of the situation is indispensable for the understanding of words. Utterance has no meaning except in the context of situation.
To obtain the meaning of utterances, Malinowski argues that one need merely correlate the utterances with the context of concurrent human activity. The problem then occurs when one is going to obtain the meaning of written language. Written language is the only kind of language for which a semantic interpretation cannot be supplied by a context of human activity. He then explains that it might be possible to characterize the meaning of the sentence in terms of the meanings of the lexical items comprising it. At one point Malinowski denied the assumption that the meaning of lexical items is ‘contained’ in them, yet here he explicitely refers to the meaning of lexical items (p. 19).
Malinowski proposes three different types of context of situation. Those are: (1) situation in which putatively speech interrelates directly with bodily activity that is culturally ‘significant’, (2) narratives—the situation of the moment of narration and the situation referred to by the narrative, (3) situation in which speech is used to fill—so to speak—a speech vacuum. (p. 21)
4. ‘Coral Garden and Their Magic’ (1935)
In this book, Malinowski introduced three major ideas into his semantic theory, and all of them are related to the notion that the objective of linguistic analysis is to interpret actual texts in a foreign language in the language of the ethnographer. The first is concerned with the context of linguistic data. The real linguistic fact is the full utterances within its context of situation. The second new major idea concerns with the range of meaning. If a sound is used in two different contexts, it cannot be called one word. It must be considered as really two words that happen to be homophonous. The third major notion in Coral Garden is that the context of situation may be enable one to disambiguate sentences that are semantically ambiguous. Within Malinowski’s theory, on the other hand, no sentence should be ambiguous, since it can be correlated with at most only one context of situation at a time. (p. 30 – 31)
b. Defining Pragmatics and the Aspects of Meaning in Pragmatics
A number of distinct usages of the term pragmatics have sprung from Morris’s original division of semiotics: the study of the huge range of psychological and sociological phenomena involved in sign systems in general or in language in particular; or the study of certain abstract concepts that make reference to agents (Carnap’s sense); or the study of indexicals or deitic terms (Montague’s sense); or finally the recent usage within Anglo-American linguistics and philosophy.
Traditionally, syntax is taken to be the study of he combinatorial properties of words and their parts, and semantics to be the study of meaning, so (1) pragmatics is the study of language usage. Such a definition hardly suffices to indicate what the practioners of pragmatics actually do. Let us consider a set of possible definitions of pragmatics. One possible definition might go as follows: (2) pragmatics is the study of the principles that will account for why a certain set of sentences is anomalous, or not possible utterances. The sentences like ‘Fred’s children are hippies, and he has no children’; ‘I order you not to obey this order’ do not have contexts in which they could be appropriately used (Levinson, 1983: 7). Although an approach of this sort may be quite a good way of illustrating the kind of principles that pragmatics is concerned with, it will hardly do as an explicit definition of the field.
Another kind of definition that might be offered would be that (3) pragmatics is the study of language from a functional perspective, that is, that it attempts to explain facets of linguistic structure by reference to non-linguistic pressures and causes. Such a definition for pragmatics would fail to distinguish linguistic pragmatics from many other disciplines interested in functional approaches to language, including psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.
One quite restricted scope for pragmatics is that (4) pragmatics should be concerned solely with principles of language usage, and have nothing to do with the description of linguistic structure. To ivoke, Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance, pragmatics is concerned solely with performance principles of language use. Katz and Fodor suggested that a theory of pragmatics would essentially be concerned with the disambiguation of sentences by the contexts in which they were uttered. (p. 8) In fact, it is clear that contexts do a lot more than merely select between available semantic reading of sentences.
Here we come to the heart of the definitional problem. Let us consider some potential definitions that are more plausible candidates. We may begin with a definition that is specially aimed at capturing the concern of pragmatics with features of language structure. (5) Pragmatics is the study of the relations between language and context that are grammaticalized, or encoded in the structure of a language. (p. 9) The main strength of this definition of pragmatics is that it restricts the field to purely linguistic matter. It is a definition that handles the aspect of pragmatics concerned with linguistic structure, but not the side concerned with principles of language usage, or at least only indirectly as they impinge on linguistic organization.
In the definition above, the notion of encoding implies that pragmatics is concerned with certain aspects of meaning. One kind of definition that would make this central might run is that pragmatics is the study of all those aspects of meaning not captured in a semantic theory. Such a theory means that there will be a great deal of the general field of meaning left unaccounted for by a restricted semantic theory, and this could be indeed the domain of pragmatics. (p. 12)
The distinction between sentence and utterance is of fundamental importance to both semantics and pragmatics. A sentence is an abstract theoretical entity defined within a theory of grammar, while an utterance is the issuance of a sentence in an actual context. Semantics is concerned with sentence-meaning, and pragmatics with utterance-meaning. (p. 18 – 19)
Let us turn to another definition that would give he context-dependent nature of such phenomenon more centrality. (6) Pragmatics is the study of relations between language and context that are basic to an account of language understanding. Here the term understanding is used to draw attention to the fact that understanding an utterance involves a great deal more that knowing the meanings of the words uttered and the grammatical relations between them.
The strengths of such a definition are hat it recognizes that (7) pragmatics is essentially concerned with inference (Thomson in Levinson, 1983; 21). Given a linguistic form uttered in a context, a pragmatic theory must account for the inference of presuppositions, implicatures, illocutionary force and other pragmatic implications. Secondly, it does not make the distinction between semantics and pragmatics along the encoded or non-encoded line. This is important because there still controversy over whether such pragmatic implications as presuppositions or illocutionary force are or are not encoded or grammaticalized in linguistic forms. Thirdly, it includes most aspects of the study of principles of language usage. (p. 21)
Let us now turn to one of the definitions most favoured in the literature. This definition would make central to pragmatics a notion of appropriateness or felicity. (8) Pragmatics is the study of the ability of language users to pair sentences with the context in which they would be appropriate. Such a definition provide a nice parallel with semantics: for just as a semantic theory is concerned with the recursive assignment of truth conditions to well-formed formulae, so pragmatics is concerned with the recursive assignment of appropriateness-conditions to the same set of sentences with their semantic interpretations. In other words, a pragmatic theory should predict for each and every well-formed sentence of a language, on a particular semantic reading, the set of contexts in which it would be appropriate. (p. 24 –25)
Let us now turn to the last definition of pragmatics that is simply to provide a list of the phenomena for which a pragmatic theory must account. (9) Pragmatics is the study of deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech act, and aspects of discourse structure. (p. 27)
III. CONCLUSION
From the two different basic theories, we may say that Malinowski made of the knowledge of context of situation to interpret particular utterances in the texts that he had collected. We discover that in fact he use it to supply their semantic interpretation and to supplement his knowledge of their meaning, which he obtained independently of his knowledge of their contextual setting. In evaluating the influence of Malinowski’s views about language, and in particular about semantics, it is important to realize that his idea on the role of context to assert meanings have great effects. Viewed from the sequence of time, I can say that Malinowski’s idea influences very much Morris’s introduction of pragmatics—pragmatics is the study of aspects of language that require reference to the users of the language. Afterwards, Malinowski’s idea on contextual meaning plays very great role on pragmatists’ further definitions on pragmatics—definitions (6), (7), (8), and (9).
From the date of publication, Malinowski’s articles about semantics, in particular about the important role of contexts in decoding meanings, were issued earlier—‘Classificatory Particles’ (1920), ‘Argonauts of the Western Pacific’ (1922), ‘The Problem of Meaning’ (1923), and ‘Coral Garden and Their Magic’ (1935)—than Morris’s introduction of the trichotomy syntax, semantics, and pragmaics—(1938). I do not think that Morris’s semiotic trichotomy was issued three years after Malinowski’s ‘Coral Garden and Their Magic’ (1935) was a coincidence.
Based on the two arguments above, I might argue that Malinowski’s views on semantics, in particular about the idea of his contextual meanings, very much inspired the scope of pragmatics meanings, especially the ones which account for the role of contexts in decoding meanings.
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