The Study of Language Functions

The Study of Language Functions

1. Language functions are the socio-cognitive processes of the human’s Neuro-Semantic Language Learning System. The socio (social) piece is the way that a person uses language to communicate with and to other people. And, the cognitive piece is the way a person thinks.

   • Semantic relationships
     • basis of language, for all speakers, for all languages, consists of the meaning of those relationships about people, their actions, and their objects within a context or setting.
       • Socially, children communicate about themselves in relationship to their environment.
         • Cognitively, children think only about the way they act in relationship to the objects in their world.
         • These semantic relationships function to connect the child to his or her world and the child’s world to the child’s thinking.
       • Language function
         • These structures include:
           • words
             • sounds
               • vocabulary
           • morphemes
           • phonemes
           • sentences
           • parts of speech
           • sentence order
             • sentence structures
         • English speakers typically study language from a structural perspective
       • Extended semantic relationships
         • Changes by extension or restriction of meanings The specialization law says that a generic word next to a specifying word becomes a specified word. This fact is only possible in a certain social environment. This law is related to the principle of economy of all languages.

2. Expanend language functions

   • Displacement
     • Refering their actions in the here -and-now to refering to acts that are not seen or touched is another type of language functions
   • Speech acts
     • Include the rules for the context verbal and non-verbal characteristics of the speakers utterance and the effects and the listener
     • Expanden speech acts
       • As speakers engage in discourse the language functions of the speech acts generate more and more meaning for the speakers and the listeners
       • Redundancy
         • Try to ise more words to convey a particular meaning
         • Concrete cognition
           • These complex concepts increase the language functions of displacement, semanticity, flexibility, productivity and redundancy
   • Semanticity
     • complexity or semanticity increases over the life of a person so concepts increase in meaning and new meanings continue to develop
     • Flexibility
       • To use language to think about her options and to problems solve provides
       • Productivity
         • The language user has more than one way to use language production

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