FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE illustrate the significance and necessity of the existence of language. However, on this point, people bear different views:

Jakobson’s Opinion：Speech events all have 6 primary factors with respective functions:

Addresser   addressee     context         message         code          contact

(emotive)   (conative)   (referential)    (poetic)   (metalingual)     (phatic)

 

Halliday’s Opinion：A theory of metafunctions of language, that is, language has 3 functions:

Ideational: constructs a mode of experience and logical relations

Interpersonal: enacts social relations

Texual: creates relevance to context

 

General Opinion

1.Informative

    Language is the instrument of thought, mirror of mind, prerequisite of social development.

    For example: The historical records can perform this function by telling us the information about what happened in the past days.

2. Interpersonal function

Establish and maintain one’s status in the society

For example: the way you address someone and the accent you bear

           Dear Sir, Dear Professor, Johnny---

3.Performative

Quite formal and even ritualized. To some extent, your saying is doing.

For example: I announce the opening ceremony of 2008 Olympics.

4. Emotive function

Change your emotive status

For example: God , Damn it, Wow, What a sight

5.Phatic Communication

Maintain a comfortable relationship between people without involving factual content

For example: ritual exchanges about health or weather; jargon, slangs, jokes

           God bless you, Good day, Good morning---

6.Recreational function

Share joy or beauty

For example: “dui ge” or children’s rhymes

7.Metalingual function

Talk about language itself

For example: The lion chased the unicorn all around the town. (what did the lion do)

             All around the town the lion chased the unicorn.(where or in what scope)

 

           Since we have already analyzed language, now we should come to linguistics. First of all, what is linguistics? And how is it connected with language?

 

LINGUISTICS is usually defined as the science of language or the scientific study of language.

Since language is so valuable to the individual, so critical to the efficient functioning human societies, and in itself so impressively intricate and profound in structure, it must produce studies which have practical importance. Linguistics is bound to be an academically and economically favored pursuit, a subject of theoretical importance.

 

MAIN BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS

It is generally agreed that linguistics can be divided into 5 parts.

Phonetics

Phonetics studies speech sounds including the production of speech, the description and classification of speech sounds.

1.    Articulatory phonetics: how sounds are produced

2.    Acoustic phonetics: the properties of the sound waves

3.    Auditory phonetics: how sound is heard

Phonology

Phonology studies the rules governing the structure, distribution and sequence of sounds and the shape of syllables. It deals with the sound system of a language by treating phoneme as the point of departure.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can signal a difference in meaning.

Morphology

It studies minimal units of meaning-morphemes and word-formation process. It is concerned with the internal organization of words.

For instance: The dog sees the rabbit.

           The rabbit sees the dog.

If you change the order of the words, the meaning will be changed.

Syntax

Syntax is about the forming and understanding correct English sentences. The form or structure of a sentence is governed by the rules of syntax (word order, sentence organization, word classes and other sentence elements).

Example 1: The children watched (the firework from the hill).

          The children watched the firework (from the hill).

Example 2:下雨天留客天留人不留

Semantics

Semantics studies how meaning is coded in a language. It is not only concerned with meanings of words as lexical items, but also with levels of a language below the word and above it, such as the meanings of morphemes and sentences. Its key concepts look like: semantic components, denotation of words, sense relations between words like antonym and synonym, sense relations between sentences like entailment and presumption.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. It deals with the utterance in different situations, the way language is used to communicate rather than with the way language is internally structure.

 

    However, language is not the only field concerned with language. It is developing interactive links with other sciences. Therefore, we have a name here to introduce—MACROLINGUISTICS.

 

MACROLINGUISTICS shows an interdisciplinary nature. It includes following branches:

1.Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics investigates the interrelation of language and mind. It studies processing and producing of utterances, language acquisition, biological foundation of language, the relationship between language and cognition.

2.Sociolinguistics

It covers a variety of different interest in language and society, including social functions of language and social characteristics of its users.

3.Anthropological Linguistics

In contrast, anthropological linguists are interested primarily in the history and structure of formerly unwritten languages.

4.Computational Linguistics

It is an interdisciplinary field which centers around the user of computers to process or produce human language.