Malinowski and pragmatics: Claim making in the history of linguistics

The aim of this paper is to study the grounds of Robert H. Robins’ claim (Robins, 1967, fourth edition) that much of contemporary pragmatics was anticipated by the great anthropologist and anthropological linguist called Bronislaw Malinowski. He describes Austin's work on speech acts as “following the steps of Malinowski in his dictum: ‘Speech is a mode of action, not a countersign of thought’.” We want to assess the force of that claim.