The paper presents admonishing speeches that were held in the village of Tauwema on the Trobriand Islands (Papua New Guinea). After a definition of the genre the data are presented – they consist of speeches that remind the children of the village to go to school. The analyses of these speeches show how they are structured and what they imply for the study of Trobriand culture. Moreover, they exemplify that understanding these speeches depends on culture – and situation-specific knowledge that can only be gained by an anthropological linguistic approach. It is shown that good theory must be based on good empirical research and that good empirical research is impossible without good guiding theory.