Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Language functions
The classification of macro-functions
Functional development
Micro-functions and functional language teaching
Functional analysis and coherence
Conversational principles: co-operation
Flouting the co-operative principle
Conversational principles: politeness
The social basis of conversational principles
Speech acts
Declarations and performatives
Speech act theory and coherence
Underlying force
Pragmatics, discourse analysis and language teaching
Formal links between sentences are not enough to account our
feeling that stretch the language in discourse. These are neither
necessary or nor sufficient in brief spoken exchanges.
It is important to realize that formal links reinforce the unity of
discourse.
For example: A) it’s a mystery to me, how the conjuror sawed
that woman in half.
B) Well, Jane was the woman he did it to. So presumably she
must be Japanese.
Here in this example there are formal links such as (so,she,etc)
but it is not clear how the sequence make sense.
In language functions one way of doing to look behind the literal,
formal meaning of which is said or written, and to consider what
the sender of the message intends to achieve with it and try to
understand its function.
In discourse how such inference are made we will firstly examine
the range of possible function of language and secondly try to
understand how people correctly interpret them.
Understanding help us to make relationship between the form
and the function of the language and also explain the stretches of
language. The term utterance for a unit of language used by
somebody in context to do something, to communicate and
reserve sentence for grammatically complete.
Specialists in linguistics sometimes claim that if non-specialists are asked
what the function of language is they will reply that it is to send
information or to tell other people your thoughts.
The referential function considered as most important function in which
adults and public world transmitting information.
There have been conflicting attempts to classify the main functions of
language (macro-functions). Such as given below that identifying the
elements of communication:
The addresser: the person who originate the message. This is usually the
same person who is sending the message. In case messengers and
spokespeople.
The addressee: the person to whom the message is addressed. This is the
person who usually receives the message. In case of letters and telephone
calls.
The channel: the medium through which the message travels
such as sound waves, mark on papers and telephone wires.
The message form: the particular lexical and grammatical
choices of the message.
The topic: the information carried in the message.