Submitted by – PARNASHREE PAUL B.ED 1ST SEMESTER ROLL NO. - 33 Language- its Functions and features Submitted by – PARNASHREE PAUL B.ED 1ST SEMESTER ROLL NO. - 33

DEFINITION OF LANGUAGE Language is God’s special gift to mankind. Without language human civilization, as we now know it, would have remained an impossibility.. It is present everywhere––in our thoughts and dreams, prayers and meditations, relations and communication. It is our ability to communicate through words that makes us different from animals. Language is a very important means of communication between humans.

Some linguists, however, have been trying to define language in their own ways even though all these definitions have been far from satisfactory. Here are some of these definitions to understand language. For Sapir:                 “Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols”.

Continued.. A recent and modern Linguist, Noam Chomsky endorses that: “A language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements”. Chomsky meant to convey that each sentence has a structure. Human brain is competent enough to construct different sentences from out of the limited set of sounds/symbols belonging to a particular language.

BASIC FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE Language is a multipurpose tool which performs the function of letting other people know our thoughts, ideas, emotions, feelings and so on in different ways. There are three major functions of language. Informative, expressive and the directive are the major functions of language which interact with personality, society and culture.

INFORMATIVE FUNCTION One of the basic functions of language is to communicate information of all kinds whether it is true or false correct or incorrect, important or unimportant, general or particular. All informative discourse is used to describe the world around us and to reason about it. Thus, the language which includes propaganda of all kinds and even deliberate information is said to be informative in function.

EXPRESSIVE FUNCTION As science gives us the informative function similarly, the poetry provides us the finest examples of expressive function of language. Every poet expresses his own feelings and thoughts, ideas, emotions and the experiments and experiences of life. Not only the poets use the expressive language, but also the other people express their deep and tender feelings and emotions. Poetry also gives a little bit informative function of language, but we must keep it into our mind that poet’s purpose is to express his ideas, feelings, and emotions and to convey all these things into readers mind. Thus, all expressive language may be analyzed into two component elements, to express the feelings and attitude of the speaker; and to evoke the same attitude or feelings in the hearer.

DIRECTIVE FUNCTION The third basic function of language is called “Directive Function”. Directive language is based on commands and requests. For instance, if any person says something to another person for doing anything, as a mother says her child to say prayers before going to bed, it does not mean that mother is giving information to her child or she wants to arouse something in child’s mind; but the purpose of her language is to make the child do what is indicated.

FEATURES OF LANGUAGE Some of the important characteristic features of human languages are listed by C.Hockett (which when taken together help us isolate language from other forms of communication). These are:

1. Duality of Structure/Patterning Human language displays two levels of patterning: (a) Word level and (b) Sentence level. In other words in human languages two levels of structures are found: Primary level-compounding of sounds(phonemes) into words(morphemes) and Secondary level-compounding of words into sentences.

2. Creativity/Productivity This feature refers to the fact that human language has the ability to produce new messages on any topic at any time. A sentence never heard of before can be created by human beings, i.e., the same limited set of phonemes are combined in a novel form to give novel message. The construction of new sentences involves creativity/productivity.

3. Interchangeability This means that all members(male or female) of the same species can both send and receive messages. This is obviously true of human language but not with the animal communication system.

4. Cultural Transmission Language is a set of conventions that have grown as a result of the speech habit of a large number of people. These are, therefore, conventions common to the entire social group which uses the language. This implies that languages have to be learnt. They cannot be transmitted through heredity. Charles Hockett points out that system of conventions particular to each language is culturally transmitted(i.e., acquired through learning) and not genetically transmitted.

5. Displacement Displacement means : users of language are able to refer to events remote in space and time. Animals cannot communicate about imaginary past or future which humans can do with language. In other words, animal communication is context-bound but human language is context free.

6. Specialization Specialization implies that there should not be a total physical involvement in the act of communication. Human beings can talk while being engaged in activities totally unrelated to the subject under discussion . For example, they can talk while watching TV. But a bee in a bee dance is completely involved physically in the communication process. At that point it cannot do anything else.

7. Arbitrariness This refers to the fact that there is no natural or inherent connection between a written word/sounds (signifier) and its reference (signified). That is, the relationship between the words and their meanings is quite arbitrary, it is a matter of conventions.

8. Discreteness Bee-dancing or bird song seems to have very few discrete units which are recombinable. Human language has phonemes, syllables, morphemes, words, etc., which are discrete units and can be recombined to mean different things. For example, with the help of three discrete units like /p/, /a/, and /t/ we can create pat, tap, and apt. This is not possible in the animal communication system.

9. Reflexiveness Reflexiveness means the ability to use the communication system to discuss the system itself. No evidence exists that any other species writes grammar of their language.

The placement of helping verb at the beginning, and 10. Redundancy There is a lot of redundancy in human language. For example- when we speak a sentence like “Will you play?” there are two markers to show that it is a question: The placement of helping verb at the beginning, and The rising tone with which the question would be asked. And when we write the sentence there are also two markers to show that it is a question: The placement of the helping verb at the beginning, and The punctuation (the use of question mark) at the end of the sentence to show that it is a question. This kind of redundancy i.e., two or three markers to show the same thing does not exist in the animal communication system.

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