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A professor at the London School of Economics, Malinowski became one of the twentieth century’s best-known anthropologists, initially for the publication of his doctoral study, The Family Among the Australian Aborigines,⁵⁹ and later his study of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia, Argonauts of the Western Pacific.⁶⁰

Ogden and Richards had given Malinowski the proofs of their book, and in the supplement, he heaped praise on their thinking. He takes a fragment from a conversation between Trobrianders about a canoe – “We run front-wood ourselves, we paddle in place, we turn we see companion ours, he runs rear-wood” – and shows that it can’t make sense “without reference to the broader context of verbal utterance,” the meanings of things and social relationships, both practical and magical, that make the totality of Trobriand culture. For Ogden and Richards’ phrase “sign-situatedness,” Malinowski substitutes “context of situation.” Malinowski is interested in “speech as mode of action rather than as a countersign of thought .”⁶¹ This approach to meaning he characterizes as “functionalist.”⁶²

M.A.K. Halliday draws inspiration from this idea in Malinowski. “The context of situation is a generalized semiotic construct deriving from the culture – something that is recognized by the members as a form of social activity that they can engage in. Now, any given instance of a situation-type can be defined in terms of three factors that we call field, tenor and mode: what’s going on, who’s taking part, and what part the particular semiotic system (in this case language) is playing.”⁶³ The meaning is in the function of language in the context of situation, hence the name for Halliday’s theory, “systemic-functional grammar.”^§MS0.3a

Halliday’s field creates a function in language he calls “ideational” – roughly our “reference.” Tenor creates an “interpersonal” function, roughly our “agency.” And mode creates a “textual” function, roughly our “structure.” But Halliday’s system starts and ends with language. His three kinds of function point out from language to situation; the contextual meanings he finds and analyzes are only those to be found in language, meanings on its outside.

For a multimodal grammar, we want to argue, meaning is just as much out there, in and with the context itself. The traffic of meaning goes both ways, between artifacts that are evidence of meaning (speech, writing, objects, and the rest), and the contexts in which they are found. This is why we extend the functions of meaning into context itself. Malinowski, we think, would likely agree.

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⁵⁹ Bronislaw Malinowski, 1913 [1963], The Family Among the Aborigines, New York: Schocken Books.

⁶⁰ Bronislaw Malinowski, 1922 [1984], Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.

⁶¹ C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, 1923 [1989], The Meaning of Meaning, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 300–02, 304, 306, 326; Bronislaw Malinowski, 1948, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, pp. 228–76.

⁶² Bronislaw Malinowski, 1962, Sex, Culture, and Myth, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, pp. 223–25.

⁶³ J.R. Martin, ed. 2013, Interviews with M.A.K. Halliday: Language Turned Back on Himself, London: Bloomsbury, p. 80.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 41–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Bronisław Malinowski’s “Context of Situation” §AS1.1.3b