Publications

Abstract

In his famous introduction to his monograph “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” Bronislaw
Malinowski (1922: 24f.) points out that a “collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic
narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore and magical formulae has to be given as a corpus
inscriptionum, as documents of native mentality”. This is one of the prerequisites to “grasp the
native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world”. Malinowski managed
to document a “Corpus Inscriptionum Agriculturae Quriviniensis” in his second volume of “Coral
Gardens and their Magic” (1935 Vol II: 79-342). But he himself did not manage to come up with a
holistic corpus inscriptionum for the Trobriand Islanders. One of the main aims I have been pursuing
in my research on the Trobriand Islanders' language, culture, and cognition has been to fill this
ethnolinguistic niche. In this essay, I report what I had to do to carry out this complex and ambitious
project, what forms and kinds of linguistic and cultural competence I had to acquire, and how I
planned my data collection during 16 long- and short-term field trips to the Trobriand Islands
between 1982 and 2012. The paper ends with a critical assessment of my Trobriand endeavor.

Abstract

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. The e-book is made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.