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It is assumed that in the case of contact languages, it is the nonverbal context of use of these languages that may be the key factor in determining the nature of each language. Contact languages, perhaps even to a greater extent than larger or more common, the so called national languages, may establish the identity of the speech communities that use them. The text presents also selected ways in which contact languages arise, adding to the types of languages known to science, such as endogenous and exogenous contact languages, a new name for the category of languages, which are isogenic contact languages.

“It has been the effort of the author to connect the study of language with the study of other branches of anthropology, for a language is best understood when the habits, customs, institutions, philosophy – the subject-matter of thought embodied in the language – are best known. The student of language should be a student of the people who speak the language; and to this end the book [paper – P.C.] has been prepared, with many hints and suggestions relating to other branches of anthropology.” Powell ([1877] 1880: vi).

Book review: Brzozowska, D., Chłopicki, W. (eds). (2012). Polish Humour. Humour and Culture 2. Kraków: Tertium. 681 pp.

Anthropological linguistics, and by default also anthropological pragmatics, grew as sub-disciplines of both anthropology and linguistics. “The intellectual basis for anthropological linguistics in the United States derives from Boas ([1911] 1966), whose interests and concerns led to the anthropological view of language, which is that language is an integral part of culture (…)” (Klein 2006: 296). Pragmatics enters the scene, telling the researcher how to analyse the aforementioned phenomena. Therefore, anthropological pragmatics would be responsible for equipping the researcher with tools, for it is language and language-oriented mechanisms of communication, the study of which provides a much clearer insight into cultural phenomena which often direct the use of language representing culture from both the synchronic and the diachronic point of view. “[O]ne approaches language from an anthropological view, which includes the uses of language and the uses of silence, as well as the cultural problems involved in silence and speech” (ibid.).

By the year 800 A.D. Scandinavian speech communities were forming a new cultural and linguistic entity which had fossilized and considerably expanded by the end of the Viking Age. The conversion to Christianity was connected with abandoning the worship of pagan gods and the acquisition of new cultural values which at that time could not have been more foreign to the mainstream Vikings. Thanks to the runic notations one can trace the passage from paganism to Christianity. There were many attempts to define what the book is. In one of the attempts at such a definition it is claimed that it is the book which materializes in a graphic form the essence of culture in which the book is produced. Book production materials depend to a large extent on the historical and cultural circumstances of the epoch in which the book is produced. What is more, books are supposed to meet social expectations of their time, and fulfill a series of utilitarian functions. Runic inscriptions, functioning as indispensable tools of social communication fulfilled the information-warning function; they also served the function of intergenerational links which have the potential to last for a very long time in extremely adverse conditions. The paper argues in favor of understanding a certain number of runic inscriptions carved on stone as culture-dependent instances of Scandinavian proto-books, for they fulfill precisely the same functions as contemporary books.

On the basis of the assumption that any discourse is a highly context-dependent, and dynamically changing phenomenon of textual nature, and with reference to the fact that there may be used in linguistic research certain standards of textuality, the paper shows that the standards can be grouped into, e.g., three general sections (text-oriented, sender-oriented and context-oriented) which can be used as a starting point for further research in the study of textlinguistics and journalistic discourse.