On Mutual Prediction Between Context And Text

The relationship between context and text has held people's interest for long. Halliday argues that the fundamental relationship between the two is their mutual prediction and has further established his theory of the one-to-one correlation between the three factors of context of situation (field, tenor and mode) and the three metafunctions of language (experiential, interpersonal, and textual function) corresponding with different semantic configurations to show how the mutual prediction has worked. While as for to what degree the mutual prediction can go, Halliday hasn't given many suggestions. That's what the current author wants to contribute to.The ideas of the current paper have been organized into five chapters with the last part being a conclusion of the previous four.In Chapter One, we introduced the researches done by other scholars on the definitions of context and text and the relationship between them with a view to providing some background information for Halliday's theory of context and text and highlighting his work. Motivated by this purpose, we had classified the different ideas of the scholars into different types so that their contributions and their association with Halliday's theory could be easily recognized. For example, we classified the definitions context into the type of Malinowski's, Firth's and Buhler's. This chapter mainly functioned as an introduction to the main job done later.In Chapter Two, Halliday's theory of context and text in terms of mutual prediction which was the theoretical base of the following search into the degree of the mutual prediction was brought forth. While doing this job, we had tried hard to reveal the way Halliday might have built up the relationship between context and text, through an as thorough as possible presentation of his views on context, text and the functions of language and the recognition their different roles like the bridge role of the functions of language. Finally we concluded that Halliday had actually hypothesized the relationship of mutual prediction between context and text first and then had it proved. This conclusion counts much because it is of methodological meaning to our study on the degree of themutual prediction in the following.Chapter Three is a brief introduction to the text analysis done by different scholars including Halliday guided by systemic functional grammar. By presenting this, we intended to prove that Halliday's functional grammar was operable and applicable enough to become the guiding theory of our following text analysis.At this stage, we finished the preparatory work for the study of our main concern—the degree of the mutual prediction between context and text: the theoretical base of Halliday's theory of the mutual prediction between context and text was founded, the way of carrying out this study found its clue in Halliday's way of building his theory, and the methods of the text analysis were justified.Then came the most important part of the current study—Chapter Four on which the creativity and contributions of this paper mainly rest. As was stated earlier, in this chapter, we would explore the degree of the mutual prediction between context and text. It was expected to be difficult and risky owing to the less attention it has drawn from other scholars. First we recognized that to solve the problem you had to find some criterion by which you could judge the degree, that is, the essence of the problem was to find the relative factors affecting the degree. Then we made a hypothesis about its connection with the factor of the "closedness" and "openness" of register. It was argued that the more closed a register was, it was easier to make predictions in it, and the more open a register was, it was more difficult to make predictions in it. The next step was to find theoretical and data proof for it. The former was finished mainly by an explication of the definitions of register and closed and open registers. And we completed the latter by predicting the texts from three contexts and predicting contexts from three texts which were respectively in combination with three registers of different degree of closedness.However, the hypothesis was far from perfect in that theoretically it was expected to concern more factors like the level of register and genre, and materially, it was supposed to be proved with more data and in a more objective way. But, once it was developed into a theory, it would be very meaningful both to practice and to theoretical development, for example, in translation and teaching. It was for this reason that the current author expressed her hope to further her study on this issue in the future in the last chapter—Chapter Five.