【正文】 ge that extends from Firth to Halliday. Firth’ s theoretic studies of context Largely affected by Malinowski, Firth, acclaimed as the father of the functional theory of language, moved even further to explore the meaning by setting up his own theory of semantics upon the concept of context. And he claimed that meaning is not only related with its environment, but also “ deeply embedded in the living process of persons maintain themselves in society.” (Liu Runqing 1988:67) Firth absorbed Malinowaki’ s notion of context of situation, but his understanding of context of situation is different from that of Malinowaki. For Malinowaki, context of situation refers to the immediate environment where utterances are embedded. While as to Firth, context can not be regarded as something concrete, instead, it is the representation of the surroundings. We can get this information from his words as follows: My view was, and still is, that‘ context of situation’ is best used as a suitable schematic construct to apply to language events, and that it is a group of related categories at a different level from grammatical categories but rather of the same abstract nature. A context of situation for linguistic work brings into relation the following categories: (1) The relevant features of participants: persons, personalities. a. The verbal action of the participants. b. The nonverbal action of the participants. (2) The relevant objects. (3) The effect of the verbal action. (Firth, 1957:182) While Firth as a linguist, he pay a careful attention to linguistic context that distinguished himself from Malinowski. In 1935, Firth pointed out that the context includes the following five branches: phonological, morphological, lexical, clausal context and context of situation. The first four ponents belong to the linguistic proper (牛強(qiáng)、陳林華 ,1999:32) and the last one is consist of both situational and verbal context. Firth also notices the difference between extra linguistic and linguistic context. His classified the linguistic context together with his context of situation was contained in his semantic theory. Firth defined meaning as “function in context” (Sampson,1980:226).Meaning should be viewed as a bination of contextual relations and phoics, grammar, lexicology and semantics each contributes to the totality of meaning in their respective context. When analyzing the meaning of an utterance, we first abstract it from its context of situation and then separate the plex of meaning into its ponent functions called modes. Halliday’ s theoretic studies of context At the base of the Malinowski’ s and Firth’ s studies of context, Halliday employed Firth’ s idea of context to build the systemicfunctional theory in which the categories and their relations are explained clearly. Descending directly from Firth’s view of context theory, Halliday, took a functional approach to view language as an instrument of social interaction. Halliday points out that “all languages are languages in use, in a context of situation, and all of it relates to the situation”(1978:33), which shows the importance of context in any interpretation of a text. Therefore, a text is an example of social meaning in a particular context of situation. Since we do not use language alone while always use it in conjunction. Thus context of situation is a necessary ingredient, without it any linguistic theory will be inadequate. Halliday’ s concept of context of situation deserves our attention. He was ispired by Basil Bernstein’ s notion of “ critical socializing context” . Halliday proposed that context of situation should be represented in still more abstract terms than what Firth had suggested. Context of situation does not mean a special situation with tangible dimensions. It should be seen as a periodicity “ situation type” . Later Halliday identified three situation types: field, tenor and mode. Field refers to the continual social activity where the linguistic plays as a constitutive part. While tenor refers to the relation among the relevant participants: who are these participants in this social activity under research. And mode refers to the role that language acts in the total situation. Typical examples of mode are “ both the channel taken by the languagespoken or written, extempore or preparedand its genre or rhetorical mode, as narrative, didactive, persuasive, ‘phatic munication’ and so on” (Halliday amp。 B 所以我說等馬丁先生結(jié)婚的時(shí)候，你若是還待在這個(gè)地方，我愿你不要因?yàn)橥忝糜H近關(guān)系而結(jié)識(shí)他太太，她可能只是個(gè)農(nóng)民的女兒，沒有受過教育。 2) We put our heads together to solve this problem. 我們集思廣益來解決這個(gè)問題。 6) The head of my bed was piled with things. 我的床頭堆滿了東西。 ” Sentence context The change of sentences’ meaning in munication Because of the difference in meaning in expression, the functions of sentences in munication are various. Without context, the sentences only own literal meaning. But with the change of the situation of the sentences, sentences usually express the meaning beyond the original ones. For example, the original meaning of “ Door, please” is simple but the real meaning could be: “ Open the door, please.” or “ Close the door, please.” We can clearly know that the translation is definitely depends on the context. Sentence context’ s essential factors Substitution: to substitute an expression It is a method that avoids the repetition and bines the sentence. (i) Nominal substitute: to use the noun substitutes. We can see examples as follows: 1) The customer doesn’ t like this book. Show him another one. (one=book) 這位顧客不喜歡這本書，給他一本別的?！? 2） We must finish it tonight, or we will get into trouble.(or=haven’ t finish it tonight) 我們必須今晚完成， 不然我們會(huì)有麻煩。 2) I don’ t know when (to meet him) and where to meet him. 我不知道什么時(shí)候（接他）在哪里接