语言学

5、Why do we say context is important in learning a foreign language? Support your argument with examples.There is no doubt that context is very important in learning a language, especially a foreign language. Taken our English learning experience for example, we recognized that the best way to recall new vocabularies is to put them into contexts early from we started to learn English.As we all know, the ultimate aim of language is to communicate, that is, to convey meaning. The objective we want to learn a foreign language is also to communicate with foreigners successfully. However, unless speaker and hearer, or writer and reader know the meaning of words, can we communicate successfully. But one word can have several meanings. As long as we know the time, the place of the utterance, the speaker and the hearer, the actions they are performing at the time, the various objects and events exists in the situation, even some other surroundings, we can easily know the exact meaning of the word in that particular environment. While all these information can get easily from the context the word is in. context is concerned with the probability of a word’s co-occurrence or collocation with another word, which forms part of the “meaning” of the word, and also with the part of that precedes and follows a particular utterance.For example, the meaning of the word “green”differs in the two collocations of “green forest” and “green hand”. And the meaning of the word “seal” in the sentence “The seal could not be found” can not be determined unless the context in which the sentence occurs is restored.Meanwhile, contextualism is one of a very important ways in the study of meaning. J.R.Firth, a representative of contextualism, hold the view that “We shall know a word by the company it keeps”. That is, meaning should be studied in terms of situation, use, context. Language communicate does not occur in a vacuum, it always occurs in a context, not isolation. As it could be impossible to give an adequate description of meaning if the context of language use is left unconsidered.Context determines the speaker’s use of language and also the hearer’s interpretation of what is said to him. Without the information we gain from the context, communication could not be possible. So there will be no significance that we learn a foreign language. For example, the sentence “It is cold here” might be said by the speaker to ask the hearer to turn on the heater, or leave the place, or to put on more clothes, or to apologize for the poor condition of the room, depending on the situation of the context. But, if we have known from the context that the utterance occurs when a people who wants to tell his friend the climate where his friend wants to go, so we can easily know that he wants to remind his friend to take more clothes.From the above example, we know the importance of context when we want to understand a sentence exactly. It’s not only the understanding of each single word, but the understanding of the whole. While this kind of understanding based on the understanding of the context. Actually, in our daily communication, we can interpretate each other even we do not know the meaning of every word. Of course, that also bases on our interpretation of the whole dialogue.What’s more, the meaning of linguistic form is usually connected with the context. Some words used by us have very rich meanings, not only its only meaning but also the meaning that the environment has given. So we can not just understand it from lexical meaning or grammatical meaning, they all should be connected with context.When a word with several meanings is used in an inadequate context, it can create ambiguity, while this question does not arise in an adequate context. That is, an adequate context can eliminate the ambiguity of words. For example, the word “hard” in the context “She is a hardbusinesswoman”can mean both“hardworking”and “difficult”, the context can not limit its meaning. But there would be no misunderstanding if the sentence is changed into “She is a hard business woman to deal with”.Lastly, context can help us to master grammar in our language learning. Each word has facial and inner connection, including grammatical coherence, while we can not find them if we can not understand the whole context. Therefore, only when we find the connection can we understand the meaning well, which, can also develop our ability to master a foreign language potential.All in all, context is our linguistic environment. It offers the particular situation in which people communicate with each other. A foreign language study can not leave the environment of language. Only when we master the whole context, can we understand words, sentences and even the underlying meaning well，and then can we learn a foreign language well. Ultimately, we can reach our final aim--use it to communicate with foreigners successfully.22班26号韩雪萍。