One person who strongly influenced the British sociolinguist J. R. Firth (who was not only the first person to hold a chair of linguistics in Gt. Britain, but also Michael Halliday's teacher), was the Polish-English anthropologist and ethnograph Bronislaw Malinowski. It was Malinowski who first introduced the idea of language and interaction being situated in a `situation of context'. He did so in order to theoretically accommodate his deep concern with the need to describe and take account of the complex relationship he as anthropologist perceived between between human beings, language, culture and the immediate environment. For Malinowski, use of language is closely, indeed irrevocably, tied to human beings' motivated interactions with one another and with their natural environment[1]. Without the sense of community created by our ability to communicate in language, unified social action in relation to this environment is impossible, says Malinowski. He gives the following example to illustrate this point:
`Take for instance language spoken by a group of natives engaged in one of their fundamental pursuits in search of subsistence -- hunting, fishing, tilling the soil; or else in one of those activities, in which a savage tribe express some essentially human forms of energy -- war, play or sport, ceremonial performance or artistic display such as dancing or singing. The actors in any such scene are all following a purposeful activity, are all set on a definite aim; they all have to act in a concerted manner according to certain rules established by custom and tradition. In this, Speech is the necessary means of communion; it is the one indispensable instrument for creating the ties of the moment without which unified social action is impossible.' [O & R: 310]
Notice here that Malinowski uses the terms Speech (c.f. the Word) and communion, to emphasise the strong, almost sacral nature of the bonds that form and maintain a subjective sense of culture and community[2]. Later on, Malinowski goes on to say that:
`All the language used during such a pursuit is full of technical terms, short references to surroundings, rapid indications of change -- all based on customary types of behaviour, well-known to the participants from personal experience. Each utterance is essentially bound up with the context of situation and with the aim of the pursuit, whether it be the short indications about the movements of the quarry, or references to statements about the surroundings, or the expression of feeling and passion inexorably bound up with behaviour, or words of command, or correlation of action. The structure of all this linguistic material is inextricably mixed up with, and dependent upon, the course of the activity in which the utterances are embedded. The vocabulary, the meaning of the particular words used in their characteristic technicality is not less subordinate to action. For technical language, in matters of practical pursuit, acquires its meaning only through personal participation in this type of pursuit. It has to be learned, not through reflection but through action.' [O& R: 312-13]
Halliday points out that in modern linguistics we are generally far too obsessed with the referential properties of language, and he also stresses that language itself is not in any way `constrained by the need to refer'[3]: Even if a mother was fully aware of all the multiplicity of features of the social order that her dialogue with her child was bringing into being, her baby could scarcely be expected to understand them even if she was to try and explain them for it. Metalanguages of science are to some extent then, always `dysfunctional' in some way or other, seen from an interpersonal and even experiential point of view. They cannot always manage to accommodate and describe what it is they have originally been `developed' to describe. In many ways `everyday' language will often express highly complex ideas in a more understandable way than many metalanguages. One instance of this emerged at a cross-disciplinary seminar that we organised in 1993 at the University of Trondheim to examine aspects of so-called `virtual reality' technology. A researcher from the Norwegian Institute of Technology, working in the field of acoustics, gave us a talk on some new simulation techniques for creating the impression of three-dimensional acoustic spaces. When he wanted to describe for the rest of us the resonance time and othe acoustic qualities of the room we were holding the seminar in (the department of drama, film and theatre's `Black Box' theater), he used terms like `warm' and `red', rather than figures and formulae. In the discussion after his talk, we asked him why he used these metaphors, and he explained that it was the only way he felt he could visualise for us his, and his particular field's insights into the nature of acoustic phenomena.
Children's actions in their attempts to make meaning out of their interactions with the environment symbolise in many ways the very basic human drive to interaction and interpretation. The child's meaning-making manifests itself to begin with through simple actions directed towards physical objects in the immediate environment. Malinowski provides some of his own observations of how very young children start to investigate and attribute meaning to objects in their physical surroundings through spontaneous, `hands-on' manipulations of these.
`When the child begins to handle things, play with objects of its surroundings, an interesting feature can be observed in its behaviour, also associated with the fundamental nutritive tendency of an infant. It tries to put everything into its mouth. Hence the child pulls, tries to bend and ply soft or plastic objects, or it tries to detach parts of rigid ones. Very soon isolated, detachable things become of much greater interest and value than such as cannot be handled in their entirety. As the child grows up and can move things more freely, this tendency to isolate, to single out physically, develops further. It lies at the bottom of the well-known destructive tendency of children. This is interesting, in this connection, for it shows how the mental faculty of singling out relevant factors of the surroundings -- persons, nutritive objects, things -- has its parallel in the bodily behaviour of the child. Here again in studying this detail of behaviour, we find a confirmation of our pragmatic view of early mental development.' [O & R: 331]
The `drive to interaction' with the environment as a means of starting to make sense of what is there extends naturally enough to the child's immediate caregivers, especially to the mother, who, due to her special role as living nutrition-provider, naturally becomes a very important part of the child's early environment. Later on, as language and thought begin to develop, other kinds of meaning-making interactions than those that are purely nutritionally motivated appear with the development of language. The importance of `interaction in language': dialogue, for the young child's development and construction of its own unique position within the wider context of social and cultural norm systems, and the development of its personal variant of the lexicogrammatical system of its own (and subsequently, or simultaneously, other) language(s) is well-documented, and something generally taken more or less for granted. However, as Patrizia Violi (personal communication) has pointed out, there seems often a tendency for semioticians and other communication researchers to underplay and underestimate the role of language in modelling both our internal and external worlds. Intrapersonal, or intrapsychic communication is also an important factor in both childrens' and adults' (re)constructions of the world around them and in their meaning-making on the basis of their subjective experiences of this life-world.
Meaning-making through language, then, does not stop when communication with others, or our interactions with some part of the environment ceases. The process of meaning-making continues intrasubjectively (cf. Lev Vygotsky's idea of thought as `internalised language' (Vygotsky 1978), and Niklas Luhmann's idea of `autopoiesis' (Luhmann 1986)), and consequently has significant effects on individuals' subsequent interactions with the environment. Jerome Bruner and Joan Lucariello's studies of children's narrative reconstruction of the world have for instance shown that children internalise and reconstitute the experiences they have had in terms of their own frames of reference (presumably intrapsychically), and then go on to consolidate these as `meaning' through retelling in their own words for their immediate caregivers (Bruner & Lucariello 1989). It is of course extremely difficult to study postulated intrapsychic communication of this kind (at least with reference to the ways in which it becomes manifested at the level of consciousness and language), since one can only rely on subjective interpretations from individuals of their own inner states, but it is in any case important to focus much more attention on the issue of the role of both inter- and intrasubjectivity in interpersonal communication, and on what we might call the quality of the emotional environment and the interactions that the interpreting community of significant others provide for the child as it grows and develops.
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