@article{oai:soar-ir.repo.nii.ac.jp:00017718, author = {宮井, 捷二}, journal = {信州大学教養部紀要. 第一部, 人文科学}, month = {Mar}, note = {In the field of linguistics in Japan, more attention should be paid to the London School of Linguistics, particularly its contextual theory, which was initiated by Bronislaw Malinowski and developed by J. R. Firth. Malinowski applied the conception of the context of situation in his anthropological analysis, while Firth used it for the formulation of linguistic theory. Malinowski's context of situation, which is in more concrete form than Firth's, implies not only the verbal context of the utterance, but also the matrix of non-linguistic relevant features including even the 'context of culture.' Firth's idea of context is more abstract. His proposed interior relations of context are as follows: 1. The participants: persons, personalities and relevant features of these. (a) The verbal action of the participants. (b) The non-verbal action of the participants. 2. The relevant objects and non-verbal and non-personal events. This proposal has some points which could be improved. Firstly, the participants (addresser or addressee) should not be included in context. Secondly, personalities as explained in Firth (1957), should not be taken into account at some levels of linguistic analysis, at least in grammar. From Firth's point of view, linguistics at all levels of analysis is. concerned with 'meaning', or function in context, which is the center of his analysis both of linguistic form and of linguistic function. Any meaningful linguistic analysis would be impossible without taking into account the context, in addition to other fundamental factors of languageaddresser, addressee, message and form. The language-event should be held to consist of the functions of all these factors. The transformational grammarians' criticism that because context or situation could not be described exhaustively, it should not be described at all, comes from their misunderstanding of the terms. Context is an abstraction from (human) experience and is not the same as realities. The British linguists' countercriticism is that competence-dominated linguistics, which takes a de-situationalized view of language, is not fruitful. Context should be classified on the basis of some linguistic formal criteria, as shown in this paper. Moreover, something like context must also underlie the concept of transformation. This will become more probable if we consider that Noam Chomsky's transformational gramimar was originated from Z. S. Harris's discourse analysis and that transformationalists have been recently concerned with problems of semantics, presupposition and discourse. One of the most important areas of both present-day and traditional linguistics has been the treatment of linguistic units larger than sentences. Therefore, transformational grammar and the London School of Linguistics should and could be complementary to each other. The adequancy of the contextual theory is clarified in its application in the linguistic analysis of English fragmentary sentences on the basis of data obtained from James Joyce's Dubliners. The tentative classification of fragmentary sentences in Dubliners is shown with relevant examples., Article, 信州大学教養部紀要. 第一部, 人文科学 6: 93-103(1972)}, pages = {93--103}, title = {ロンドン学派言語学の脈絡理論について}, volume = {6}, year = {1972} }