The Trobriand Islanders Ways Of Speaking

Bronislaw Maliniowski claimed in his monograph Argonauts of the Western Pacific that to approach the goal of ethnographic field-work, requires a "collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore and magical formulae ... as a corpus inscriptionum, as documents of native mentality". This book finally meets Malinowski's demand. Based on more than 40 months of field research the author presents, documents and illustrates the Trobriand Islanders' own indigenous typology of text categories or genres, covering the spectrum from ditties children chant while spinning a top, to gossip, songs, tales, and myths. The typology is based on Kilivila metalinguistic terms for these genres, and considers the relationship they have with registers or varieties which are also metalinguistically distinguished by the native speakers of this language. Rooted in the 'ethnography of speaking' paradigm and in the 'anthropological linguistics/linguistic anthropology' approach, the book highlights the relevance of genres for researching the role of language, culture and cognition in social interaction, and demonstrates the importance of understanding genres for achieving linguistic and cultural competence. In addition to the data presented in the book, its readers have the opportunity to access the original audio- and video-data presented via the internet on a special website, which mirrors the structure of the book. Thus, the reader can check the transcriptions against the original data recordings. This makes the volume particularly valuable for teaching purposes in (general, Austronesian/ Oceanic, documentary, and anthropological) linguistics and ethnology.

This volume deals with the children’s socialization on the Trobriands. After a survey of ethnographic studies on childhood, the book zooms in on indigenous ideas of conception and birth-giving, the children’s early development, their integration into playgroups, their games and their education within their `own little community’ until they reach the age of seven years. During this time children enjoy much autonomy and independence. Attempts of parental education are confined to a minimum. However, parents use subtle means to raise their children. Educational ideologies are manifest in narratives and in speeches addressed to children. They provide guidelines for their integration into the Trobrianders’ “balanced society” which is characterized by cooperation and competition. It does not allow individual accumulation of wealth – surplus property gained has to be redistributed – but it values the fame acquired by individuals in competitive rituals. Fame is not regarded as threatening the balance of their society.

This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories, but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other narrative strategies, how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic analyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative analysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic, anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories, the means narrators use to structure them, their structural complexity and their cultural specificity.

This volume offers state-of-the-art overviews of the cross-disciplinary role and impact of Pragmatics in relation to several areas of study that it interfaces with. Pragmatics has contributed significant insights to a range of disciplines, just as these disciplines have contributed to it. Borrowing and cross-pollination between disciplines is natural, as well as necessary, but at times it seems important to take a pause and reflect on and problematize the role of pragmatics at these interfaces. In an age when disciplinary boundaries are being blurred, we need to investigate the relationship and interplay between pragmatics and related or complementary fields of enquiry with the goal of broadening and deepening our understanding of the contributions and boundaries of pragmatics as such. Here in twelve original contributions, internationally recognized authorities explore the current state and future trends in Pragmatics vis-à-vis adjacent disciplines.

Understanding Pragmatics takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide an accessible introduction to linguistic pragmatics. This book discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this book: debates the core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, languages and social classes, and linguistic ideologies incorporates examples from a broad variety of different languages and cultures takes an innovative and transdisciplinary view of the field showing linguistic pragmatics has its predecessor in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, sociology and the political sciences. Written by an experienced teacher and researcher, this introductory textbook is essential reading for all students studying pragmatics.

How do we refer to people in everyday conversation? No matter the language or culture, we must choose from a range of options: full name ('Robert Smith'), reduced name ('Bob'), description ('tall guy'), kin term ('my son') etc. Our choices reflect how we know that person in context, and allow us to take a particular perspective on them. This book brings together a team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists to show that there is more to person reference than meets the eye. Drawing on video-recorded, everyday interactions in nine languages, it examines the fascinating ways in which we exploit person reference for social and cultural purposes, and reveals the underlying principles of person reference across cultures from the Americas to Asia to the South Pacific. Combining rich ethnographic detail with cross-linguistic generalizations, it will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students interested in the relationship between language and culture.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality.

This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more empirically based or of a more applicative nature and that deal with the pragmatics of discourse, argumentation, pragmatics and law, and context. The book presents perspectives which, generally, make most of the Gricean idea of the centrality of a speaker’s intention in attribution of meaning to utterances, whether one is interested in the level of sentence-like units or larger chunks of discourse.