The Study of Language Functions

The Study of Language Functions

1. Language Functions

   • Allow a human to create a variety of cultural identities.
   • Are thesocio-cognitive processes of the human’s Neuro-Semantic Language Learning System
     • The socio is the way the person uses language to communicate with and to other people.
     • The cognitive piece is the way a person thinks.

2. Semantic Relationships

   • Meaningful relationships that a child possesses about his or her world
     • Early language acquisition
       • Agency
         • The child is learning the basic semantic relationships of agent + action + object.
           • The child as an agent in relationship to his or her own environment.
             • Social development
             • Cognitive Development

3. Extended semantic relationships

   • Adding an additional pattern to expand the meaning of the utterance
     • Referring
     • Expanding

4. Expanded language functions

   • Move a child’s communication from the here-and-now of juice cups to ideas that span time and place.
     • Displacement
       • Increases along with the increased development of conceptual meanings
         • semanticity
           • Increases over the life of a person so concepts increase in meaning and new meanings continue to develop as part of language function.
         • Flexibility
           • Ability to use language to think about her options and to problem solve
         • Productivity
           • A person become more productive, and is able to use language to create a variety of linguistic forms for literacy
         • Redundancy
           • The speaker may try to use more words to convey a particular meaning

5. Speech Acts

   • The rules for the context, verbal and non-verbal characteristics of the speaker’s utterance, and the effects on the listener
     • To be effective as intended by the speaker, they must affect the way the listener assigns meaning
     • The speaker must understand that the listener (hearer) must be able to assign the meaning the speaker wants

6. Expanded speech acts

   • The complexity of the function of language generates more than simple back and forth comments.
   • The most complex type of language function occurs in a debate where two or more speakers are using a multitude of very sophisticated speech acts
     • Predication
       • Connection between one argument that refers to a previous utterance and another argument
         • Auditory proposition
           • Two or more arguments are further predicated