The concept of context was initially advocated by Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish professor of anthropology. He said that “utterances and situation are bound up inextricably with each other and the context of situation is indispensable for the understanding of words.” (Malinowski,1923: 74) According to Malinowski, context was categorized into three types, that is, the context of situation, the context of utterance, and the context of culture. Then English linguist J. R. Firth (1964) took over Malinowski’s theory and extended it to linguistics. He thought that context of situation not only included the background where words were given, but also included the entire cultural background. Halliday is another person who made important contributions to context study after Firth. He put forward the term “register”. What “register” reflects is context. He thought register included three aspects: field, mode, and tenor. “Field” includes the fields of politics, life and science, etc. “Mode” refers to the way of using language, speaking and writing. “Tennor” includes the status, relationship and position of communicators. On this basis, he put forward the concept of “situation”, “manner” and “communicator”, which are considered as the three components of lingustic environment. With any change of the three components, it would derive a new register. And D. H. Hymes, an American sociolinguist classified the context into eight elements: setting, participant, ends, art characteristics, key, instrumentality, norms of interaction and of interpretation, and genres. He pointed out that the notion of context is concerned with what determines the appropriateness of the utterances in the particular context. Wilson(1999) says that context is a psychological construct including not only the co-text of an utterance but also the contextual factors. He put forward the notion of cognitive context, and he supposed that the persity of the cognitive context made the interpretation of utterance difficult.

Besides the western scholars, many Chinese scholars also realize the importance of context in understanding a word, a sentence, an utterance, etc. In as early as 1930s, Chen Wangdao claimed that rhetoric should adapt to the situation and the theme. The “situation” and the “theme” here refer to context. He Zhaoxiong(何兆熊,1989) defines context as the environment in which the language is used, and he illustrates context as two kinds of knowledge: inner-linguistic knowledge and extra-linguistic knowledge. And Hu Zhuanglin, (胡壮麟, 1994) presents his view on context that context can be classified into three parts: cultural, situational and linguistic context.

According to the above mentioned, we can see that context is a very complicated phenomenon. A simplified definition of context can be concluded as below: Context consists of linguistic elements and non-linguistic elements. It is generally considered as constituted by the knowledge shared by participants. It determines the speaker’s use of language and also the hearer’s interpretation of what is said to him.  

2.1.2 The Classification of Context

There are different kinds of classification of context according to different standard. As mentioned above, Malinowski pided context into context of situation, context of culture and context of utterance. This thesis identifies two kinds of context: linguistic context, including phonetic context, grammatical context and lexical context, and non-linguistic context, including situational context and cultural context. 

Linguistic context includes phonetic, grammatical and lexical context. Phonetic context is mainly defined as stress, pause, and intonation, which can influence the meaning of utterances. For example, a shift of stress can change the property of a certain word which may express different meaning, and when read the same word or sentence in different intonations, it may express entirely different feelings. Grammatical context is usually regarded as the syntactic structure which determines the meaning of a sentence and the grammar rules make us better understand the differences among sentences. Lexical context refers to the lexical items combined with a given polysemous word. And a word can have different meanings partly depending on the different collocations. 语境在初中英语词汇教学中的应用(3):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_49300.html