ABSTRACT
According to Leech the notion of context emerged as an attempt to remove language from the purely mental sphere, amenable only to unreliable introspection, and put it in a perspective that would allow scientific observation. Context can, be approached from two directions: first, from the point of view of 'register', the specification of the elements of the communicative event, and second, from the point of view of 'scenes-and-frames', which is a kind of updated version of contextualism. Nord has attempted to put the extratextual factors in the first paragraph and the intratextual factors in the second. Language varies in different contexts and situations of use. This is accounted for in linguistics by 'register analysis'. Language users can be described by the place they occupy in: time, space, society. The language of a text may be formal not just because of tenor but also because of mode and province.
