Nature and Function of Linguistic

7/29/2019 Nature and Function of Linguistic

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Nature and

Function

Speech and Writing

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• Besides combining individual phonemes, or sounds, to form

words, when we speak we use other features too: intonation

(in English the two basic patterns are rising and falling: the voice fallsto mark the end of a phrase, but rises to indicate the speaker’s intention to continue);

rhythm (English is a stress-timed language, while Italian or French aresyllable-timed; this means that the rhythm is created according to theposition of stress within single words or group of words: in the firstcase the stress is fixed but in the second it can move according tomeaning);

pitch

(the voice may be softer or louder for several reasons such as mood,emphasis, rage, etc.);

pace

(speech may be slower or faster according to the speaker’s

communicative purpose or personality).

Speech



• Conversation takes place in real time: the pressure of time highlyinfluences many language features and forms such a contrast withwritten language; speech, in fact, is spontaneous and unplanned, thespeaker thinks on her/his feet and the language produced reflects thiswith features such as false starts, hesitations, fillers (‘well’, ‘you know’, ‘ ...erm’ , etc) and pauses which give the speaker time to think;

• Conversation is face to face: the speakers share the same ‘here andnow’; this allows them to make constant reference to things aroundthem making use of personal, temporal and spatial deixis (deixis, infact, means pointing via language) and to get immediate feedback.

Back-channel signs indicate that the interlocutor is paying attention,that she/he is interested, in agreement and so on (in English, thespeaker usually invites the listener to an answer using the so-calledtag questions, in order to negotiate or re-negotiate meanings; whilethe most frequently used back-channel words are ‘yeah’, ‘OK’, ‘mmm’, words apparently meaningless which convey communication.

The Main

Features of

Everyday Speech



• Conversation is interactive: the speakers interact with each other

constantly; people of the same culture share the unspoken ‘rules’ of turn-taking which are more or less followed according topeople’s personality and good manners; Sometimes on particularoccasions, the speaker might want to ‘hold the floor’, for exampleduring a political speech the speaker usually doesn’t want to beinterrupted and for doing this she/he uses techniques like speaking

very fast or keeping the intonation raised;

• Conversation is largely phatic talk: great part of everydayconversation has a phatic nature, in other words it has no concretepurpose other than maintaining social and interpersonalrelationships; examples of phatic talk in English are formulaicexpression known as adjacency pairs such as “How do youdo?”/”How do you do?” or the British ‘obsession’ with talking aboutthe weather.





Accent & Dialect• Language is part of people’s identity and the two aspects of oral

production which seem to reflect this fact are accent and dialect.

• Accent is the way in which words are pronounced.

• Dialect is the distinctive grammar and vocabulary which isassociated with a regional or social use of a language.

• Nowadays accents are subject to a sort of levelling. This due to therole of schools and mass media which encourage the use of Standard language.

• On the other hand, every individual has her or his own idiolect, orrather her or his personal way of using language (favourite words,

expressions, etc.), and sometimes of inventing language.• Lexical creativity, in fact, is a frequent feature in spoken language,

but inventiveness can communicate only if it is understandable, inother words invention too has to follow established and sharedconventions.



• The functional nature of spoken language leads to grammaticalforms which are less accurate than in written language.

• This is why the term ‘utterance’ is preferred instead of ‘sentence’

when we refer to a stretch of language orally produced.• Spoken English has a lower lexical density than written English. This

is evident in the use of the so-called vague language, expressionssuch as ‘sort of’, ‘and so on’, ‘or whatever’ , which make statementssound imprecise and unassertive and in the preference of delexicalverbs rather than individual verbs, that is to say verb-phrases based

on the most common verbs in the language (go, have, get, etc.)which combine with nouns to make common phrases (‘go for awalk’ rather than ‘walk’ , ‘have a swim’ rather than ‘swim’ , ‘get adrink’ rather than ‘drink ’).

• Another feature commonly associated with spoken interaction isdirectness and indirectness because they relate very closely to theface-to-face nature of speech. Sometimes we need to be moredirect and explicit in order to achieve our purpose effectively, butwe may find a situation potentially embarrassing or awkward or wemay think that we might give offence to the receiver and so wemight choose to be more indirect.



Writing• Writing is an everyday activity which is not

one-dimensional.

• Writing in English is particularly difficult

because words’ spelling is different from their

pronunciation. Hence, besides physical

manipulation, we need many sub-skills, such

as spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and, of course, grammar.



general features

that • Writing is permanent. It can survive for centuries and provides concrete proof thatwe can refer back to whenever we want;

• Writing is distant. We use written messages to communicate through time andspace with someone else that we can’t see.

• Writing is planned. It takes time and we need to think before writing. Moreimportant documents, of course, need much greater planning.

• Writing is formal. Also in this case, it depends on the importance of the messageconveyed.

• Writing is linear - or it is? English is known as an SVO language: Subject - Verb -Object, this is the most common word-order. All this seems to imply astraightforward movement from start to finish. But is it really such a direct route?

• Writing is a process. When we produce a text we realise that we often need to goback to rewrite or rub out something which doesn’t fit the whole text. Texts, infact, are written to be read, so they have an intended readership in mind.

may affectthe language

used:



always purpose-

driven• When analysing texts, we must consider these four

elements:

- CONTEXT - PURPOSE - PRODUCER - RECEIVER

• The context is the physical environment in which a text iscreated. It determines meaning.

• The purpose is what we are communicating for. It is the aim toachieve, and sometimes it may not be achieved.

• The producer is the sender of the message; her/his language

can be affected by various factors: age, gender, personality,education background, intellect, status, individual creativity,idiolect (an individually distinctive style of speaking), and so on.

• The receiver is the addressee of the message, the target toreach. The receiver will always affect the language used by theproducer.



A Text• When we look at a written text we not very often wonder

what that is because we immediately recognise it. A text, infact, is made of words but it is characterised by supporting

features typical of each text-type that may be:

- physical aspects (quality/ size/ colour of paper)

- typographical features related to:

- printing (font size and style, formatting, etc.);

- layout (columns, white spaces, etc.)

- positioning (headlines, captions, centred oraligned text, etc.);

- graphics (photos, cartoons, symbols, etc.)



• We have to choose the appropriate text-type to convey the

message desired. As well as non-linguistic elements, the

language itself is of prime importance: certain features of

language form texts which belong to a certain genre.

• A genre is a socially-sanctioned type of communicative event.

It plays a central role in the definition of culture, for genre is

society’s way of defining and controlling meaning.





Notions of

Correctness



• Whether a piece of language is "right" or "wrong" is frequently amisleading idea. In practice, language may better be described as"appropriate" or "acceptable" to a given register or context.

• What is acceptable when spoken by a teenager may not be acceptablewhen written in a report by an adult. Context is all.

• The so-called "rules" of English are usually in fact pieces of advice laiddown by grammarians who refer back to classical models, even though thestructure of Latin and Greek are very different from English. They aresometimes referred to as "nineteenth century neo-classical grammarians.“

• Some of these "rules" may be good advice for a speaker looking for amodel of clarity, and reassuring, but others are now widely seen asartificial constraints on a living language.



• Old rules such as "don't finish a sentence with apreposition", "don't start a sentence with 'and'" and "don'tsplit an infinitive" are examples of rules which are still heldto by some language users but deliberately flouted byothers.

• Grammatical rules are generally more advisory than therules governing the meaning of words. Although words dochange their meaning, have ambiguity and frequently haveseveral meanings at once, a dictionary definition is, by and large, an agreed meaning of a word. Lists of commonly confused words can be helpful in distinguishing between"whet" and "wet" or "complement" and "compliment" for example



• There are two main principles at work creatinggrammatical rules:

Prescriptive describes the attitude that there are rules and youshould obey them.

Descriptive describes the attitude of many modern linguistswhich is that what is said by natural speakers of the language is

normal and that this "real" language should be described bystudents of linguistics to create a model of language.

• In other words prescriptive grammariansimpose their views based on prescribed or laiddown rules while descriptive grammariansdescribe the language first then offer this as aframework within which users can work.

Nature and Function of Linguistic

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