【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 to arouse his interest in context. Working with the people who live under a remote culture, Malinowski made hard endeavors to translate the local dialects for Englishspeaking readers. He used various ways, such as free and literal translations, but he failed in these trying. So Malinowski later translated while made a ment, taking the contextual factors into consideration. After noting how words bee prehensive, he broadened his conception of context by the notion “ context of culture” . Malinowski later developed his idea of meaning. In his view, meaning is not contained in words alone. And his work constituted the point of departure for a method to the analysis of language 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。 Hason, 1976:22) In a word, the concept of context is a bination of a field of meaningful social interaction, a tenor and a mode of symbolic anization. They function as the determinants of a text. With a detailed specification of the context of situation according to these three parts, we are able to predict the corresponding semantic properties of a text. Other theoretic investigations into context After the start study of context by Malinowski, and subsequently explored by Firth and Halliday, more and more linguists follow their theories and extended it. Joshua. A. Fishman is the founder of American social linguistic, put fo