Krystyny Pisarkowej odkrywanie Malinowskiego

Abstract

Krystyna Pisarkowa’s Discovering of Malinowski The article is concerned with the two-volume publication Językoznawstwo Bronisława Malinowskiego [Bronisław Malinowski’s Linguistics], edited by Krystyna Pisarek. Its first volume contains the editor’s thorough analysis of the linguistic achievements of this Polish-born British anthropologist, while the second volume includes translations of Malinowski’s works and a dictionary of the Kiriwina language. The linguistic importance of Malinowski’s works had been underestimated: his articles “Classificatory Particles in the Language of Kiriwina” (1920) and “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages” (1923) were not included in the thirteen-volume collection of his writings (Dzieła [Works]). Pisarkowa, in turn, does recognize Malinowski’s contribution to linguistics and considers the following to be his unique achievements: (1) the discovery of the phatic function of speech (adopted by Roman Jakobson in his classification of language functions); (2) an explicit formulation of the principle of contextualism and the pragmatic aspect of word meaning; and (3) a precise description of the Kiriwina system of classificatory particles.