ABSTRACT
Field, Tenor and Mode derive from the pioneering work in linguistics of J.R. Firth, who was the first Chair of General Linguistics in the United Kingdom. In investigating and describing the nature of language, Firth’s central focus was on ‘meaning’ – that is, Firth (1968a: 97, emphasis original) was concerned with ‘mak[ing] statements of meaning in purely linguistic terms . . . at a number of levels of analysis: for example, in phonology, grammar, stylistics, situation, attested and established texts’. We can see from this quotation that Firth considered ‘situation’ to be a level of analysis in describing language. Firth (1968b: 14) argues that ‘“meaning” is a property of the mutually relevant people, things, [and] events in the situation’. Firth (1968c: 177) presented these ‘people, things, and events’ as a framework for investigating language in context and formalised them in the following way:
1 The participants: persons, personalities, and relevant features of these.
