The Study of Language Functions

The Study of Language Functions

1. Semantic relationships

   • one of the earliest functions of language is to tell others about what the child understands about his or her own relationship to the environment
   • Problems with acquiring basic semantic relationships
     • a lack of language development affects the social and cognitive development of the child just like the lack of social and cognitive development affects language acquisition.

2. Extended semantic relationships

   • The purpose of the child adding an additional pattern is to expand the meaning of the utterance.
   • The child’s utterances are more than just structures; the child’s words and acts represent the child’s thinking and social development.

3. Expanded language functions

   • Displacement is an important, expanded language function that begins early on and continues to expand throughout a person’s thinking
   • Semantic complexity or semanticity increases over the life of a person so concepts increase in meaning and new meanings continue to develop as part of language function.
     • Displacement and semanticity are two types of expanded language functions that take the basic semantic relationship of an agent, action, and object and move the meaning into complex ideas across time and space.
   • Only individuals who are able to think with maximum levels of language functions will have the displacement and semanticity needed to be maximally flexible.
   • These expanded language functions help a person become more productive, because the person, who has maximum use of these expanded language functions, is able to use language to create a variety of linguistic forms for literacy.
   • Redundancy There is one more very important expanded language function, redundancy. When a speaker continues to acquire meaning through the Neuro-Semantic Language Learning System, then the speaker may try to use more words to convey a particular meaning.
   • Concrete cognition The meaning of basic semantic relationships of people, their actions, and their objects increases through the neuro-semantic processes of overlapping and layering of patterns and concepts to form more complex concepts.
   • Speech acts Semantic development allows a speaker of English to use language to perform a variety of functions within a conversation. These conversational language functions or speech acts include the rules for the context, verbal and non-verbal characteristics of the speaker’s utterance, and the effects on the listener.
   • Expanded 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. The complexity of the function of language generates more than simple back and forth comments.