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Anthropology · Chapter 4

Language in Context: The Same Words, a Different Act

Bronisław Malinowski found that he could not translate what Trobriand Islanders said by handing over their words; he had to hand over the situation as well. Meaning, he argued, is not stored inside a sentence — it is produced when a sentence lands somewhere, among particular people, for a particular purpose. Below, the words hold perfectly still. Tap an utterance, then carry it to a different room and a different pair of speakers, and watch the act underneath it change completely.

Pick something said

Nine things people say — six of them fixed in form, three of them fixed in meaning. Choose one on the right.
In each case, one half of the sign is nailed down and the other half is free to move.

Hymes’ SPEAKING grid

Dell Hymes’ checklist for describing any speech event. Pick a reading and the eight cells fill in; the gold cells are the ones doing the work.
Words, and the rooms they land intap one to begin
Now put the same words in…
The context of situationMalinowski noticed that an utterance torn out of its setting is not merely harder to understand — it is incomplete. Dell Hymes turned that insight into a method, arguing that speakers acquire not just grammar but communicative competence: the knowledge of what to say, to whom, in which setting, in what tone, and when to say nothing. Pick something on the list to watch that knowledge do its work.
SPEAKING. Hymes’ checklist for describing any speech event: Setting, Participants, Ends, Act sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, Genre. Run the same sentence through it twice with two different settings and the two readings fall out on their own — which is the point. The grammar was never the hard part.
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