Functions of language and language universals

Branches of typology.

- phonological – studies sounds and their classification and types

- lexical – (words and their meaning)

- phraseology –

- morphological – (structure of a word, category, case, gender)

- general – (types of language, classification)

- special – (modern eng. – middle eng.)

FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS

Language has been examined by linguists and philosophers from the time of ancient breeze until the present day. Human language is highly developed signaling system all human languages have a limited set of speech sounds. The speech sounds are divided into consonants and vowels. The minimal units of language called phonemes are used for construction of morphemes and lexemes. Human language is a means of communication but it differs from signaling systems of animals. Human language has a sense of the past, the present and the future but animals (for ex: a dog) can’t tell his fellows about his past, parents, animals, can’t inform them or about their plans for the future. Besides animals don’t change their system in the course of history while human language changes.

Language is not inherited, it has a social nature, it depends on the society, while animals inherit their signaling system

Language has several functions:

1. Nominative function. It implies the capacity of language to realize concepts of our mind in the language.

2. Communicative function which implies that language is used to provide people with means for exchanging information.

3. Language esthetic function in poetry, advertising. We use language to express our emotions and to add additional positive emphasis.

4. Identifying function. Language demonstrates people’s identity. Members of social organizations, professions or groups use the same words, terms, as a mark of their identity.

5. Language has imperative functions. It is used to influence behavior or stimulate action. We may use imperative structures like Open the door; but we may also use could you please do smth.

6. Informative function. Is often considered to be primary function of the language, words are combined into sentences which carry information.

7. Interrogative function. When asking people questions and obtaining information.

3. Types of languages

Linguists try to find common features. This common features are called linguistic universals. (we may speak about: semantic, phonological, syntactic, grammatical universals.)

When the same universals are typical with the number of lang-s we speak about a type.

Structural classification contains 4 groups: 1. isolating, 2. flextional, 3. agglutinative, 4. incorporative.

But lang-s are never pure type. They usually combine elements of a variety of types but some features prevail. This classification was put forward by german linguist Humboldt. Friedrich Schlegel classified languages into two types: inflexional (having word endings) and non-inflexional (having affixes). His brother August Schlegel suggested 3 types: -languages without any grammatical structure (showing grammar relations by word order Chinese); - lang-s which use affixes; - with inflections.

Wilhelm Humboldt added one more group and gave all the types the names by which they are still known:
1. flexional languages. Grammar relations are shown in these languages by means of polysemantic morphemes.
e.g. Рус. временной The inflexion -ой belongs to an adjective of masculine gender, singular, in nominative case.
Roots can very rarely be used as a separate word (c.f. *врем).
Indo-European and Semitic languages belong to inflexional languages.
2. Agglutinating languages. Grammar relations are shown by a series of monosemantic morphemes, "glued" to each other.
e.g. Turkish: Okul (школа) - okullar (школы) - okullarimiz (наши школы) - okkularimizda (в наших школах).
Roots can be used as independent words (c.f. okul)
3. Isolating languages. They have no word changing morphemes. Grammar relations are shown by word order.
The Chinese language belongs to this group.
4. Polysynthetic languages. (incorporating) Words in the languages of this group are united so that a phrase or a sentence may consist of a single word. Such structure is found in the Chukchi language, some Indian languages.
Scholars used to think that the types of languages corresponded to stages of language development. So they thought that once every language was isolating by its structure and through the other stages is to become flexional sooner or later. Some looked upon this process as "perfecting" of the language, others thought it to be "degrading". Modern linguistics is against the idea of "better" or "worse" languages.