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M. Victoria Rébori
some of its passages. It includes a three-page chapter named 'Context ofSituation'. lt has internai divisions: 1) Say When!; 2) Practical Speech; 3) The Language of Planning; 4) 'Sharing'; 5) Language and Society. These are intended to summarise the main points to consider when thinking about language behaviour. From Firth's perspective, a situation is a patterned process where language is practical speech. Ris examples of practical speech are orders, directions, guiding signs, etc. In the opening section (' Say when'), after a description of a linguistic example where the meaning of the words depends entirely on the context, Firth wrote the following sentence: " ... What do the words mean? They mean what they do." (Firth, 1964 [ 1937], p. 11 0). Based on this concept, it is possible to illustrate two types of argumentation that contribute to reconstruct some passages from the history of linguistics. Both types of argumentation are linked to the explicit nature (or not) of the statement of indebtedness. By 'statement of indebtedness' we mean the (conceptual, intellectual, etc.) indebtedness of one author to another. First Type of Argumentation: Explicit lndcbtedness
Now we should bear in mind the fust situation mentioned at the beginning, in other words, the situatíon in whjch an author recognjses bis conceptual indebtedness to another. Thls ís the case of Firth regarding the Polish anthropologist B. Malinowski through the concept o f 'context ofsituation'. Here, we are interested in remaking on the passages ofacknowledgement only. The comparison of the concept in both authors would deserve a deeper study, and we shall not attempt to do it here.4 The historiography of linguistics brings up a number of references not only about the knowledge by Firth ofMalinowski's writings but also about the fact that Firth and Malinowski attended the same semjnars in the thirties. For example, T. Langendoen says, in a work devoted to the bistory of"Thc London School ofLinguistics", that their interaction was so important to both of them that the traces ofthcir mutual influence are evident: