Chinese linguist Hu Zhuanglin pided the context into three categories in the framework of the Halliday model: linguistic context which means the internal environment of discourse; situational context refers to the environment that the discourse produces, such as the characteristics of the things, the topic, the time, the place and the way of conversation; cultural context refers to the history culture and custom (Hu 44)。 Wang Chuming has deeply analyzed the function of context and mother tongue factors in the process of foreign language learning。 He also put forward compensation hypothesis concept（Wang Compensation 1）。 It is considered that the organic combination of language and context’s knowledge is the prerequisite for the use of language fluently and correctly。 From pragmatic perspective and the theory of linguistic adaptation, the process of using language is the process of language selection。 And the linguistic selection is adaptation to different context factors。 These contextual factors are involved in the psychological world, social world, physical world and language environment。

In a word, there is a wide definition of context because of linguists’ different perspective of researching。 So they have different understanding of it。 But the views of them are all reasonable。

2。2 Classification of context来*自~优|尔^论:文+网www.chuibin.com +QQ752018766*

As the definition of context is various, the linguists also have different classifications of the context because of their different research angles。 Malinowski distinguishes two kinds of context, one is the situational context, and the other is the cultural context。 British linguist Firth inherited and developed Malinowski’s view。 He pointed out there are two kinds of context。 One exists in the language, which is made up of language factors。 Another kind of context is from the external language, which is composed of non-linguistic factors。 And it is as same as the situational context that the Malinowski had raised before (Hu 47)。 The British linguist Halliday getting inspiration from the context of Firth and proposed the concept of register。 And that the register consists of field, tenor and mode。 Hymes, an American linguist, considered that the context is a product, which the forms of discourses, the content, the background, the participants, the purposes and the tools are used in the communication making with each other (Wang Rhetoric 36)。 British linguist Lyons pided context into six kinds of knowledge：roles and status, occasions, levels of formality, mediums of communication, proper subject and the right register。 Many scholars in China also have done a lot of researches on the context and they have their own categories of the context。 Chen Wangdao’s pision of context is made up of six elements。 That is when, where, why, what, how and wherefore (Chen 83)。 He Zhaoxiong considered the context as two parts (He 18)。 They are language knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge。 And the latter includes the background knowledge such as the specific culture or the specific rules of conversation and the situational knowledge。