Abstract: The fact that J.R.Firth was regarded as the father of British linguistics suffices to show his prominent influence.For the past few decades, Firth's ideas and Sinclairian linguistics have given rise to corpus linguistics, having thus formed a clear line of scholarly development.By reviewing the works of Firth, we work to interpret and re-evaluate Firthian linguistic theory and its influence on corpus linguistics in terms of a series of key notions, namely structure and system, context of situation, collocation, colligation, prosody, and meaning, with the expectation that this review will shed light on current related research.