Linguistics Essentials: Language Functions, Varieties, and Sociocultural Impact
Orality: Linguistic Signs and Communication
Linguistic signs articulate sounds made by phonating organs and collected by the ear. Writing is the transcription of these oral signs.
Double Articulation in Language
Language is characterized by two levels of articulation:
- First Articulation: An unlimited number of meaningful units (morphemes or words) are formed by combining a limited number of meaningless units (phonemes).
- Second Articulation: A limited number of meaningless sound units (phonemes) are articulated to form the meaningful units of the first articulation.
Functions of Language
Expressive Function
Reports feelings, statements, or opinions.
Representative Function
Communicates real or imagined information.
Conative (Appellative) Function
Focuses on the receiver, aiming to elicit a response.
Poetic Function
The message itself is the object of communication, focusing on its aesthetic qualities.
Phatic Function
Establishes, maintains, or verifies the communication channel.
Metalinguistic Function
Uses language to talk about language itself.
Language Variety and Dialects
Language Variety
A set of linguistic elements characterized by a particular geographic, social, or situational association. Geographical variety differs within a language.
Language
A verbal communication system shared by a linguistic community that maintains the homogeneity needed to allow intercommunication among its speakers.
Dialect
A concrete form or embodiment that a language adopts in a geographical area.
Local Speech (Localism)
A language system or locality with its own features within a broader dialect or more extensive systems.
Sociolinguistics: Social Context of Language
Studies the internal diversity of each language within the social context where it is produced. Key areas of variation include:
Semantic Variations
Use of diminutives, hyperbole, and distortion of word meanings.
Habitat (Geographic/Rural Language)
Rural language often exhibits relaxed, less careful intonation and pronunciation. Its lexicon tends to be conservative, showing insulation and resistance to change, yet it can also be influenced by linguistic fashion.
Age
Demonstrates the ability to adapt to language changes. Linguistic innovation often decreases with age.
Gender
While not solely determinative, linguistic differences between men and women are influenced by life experiences and education.
Profession
Contributes to differentiating language use, creating specialized lexical and semantic jargon.
Sociocultural Levels of Language Use
The sociocultural level is a significant factor contributing to different language uses by speakers.
Cultured Level
Ideal for expressing deep nuances of the world around us. Its features include:
- Absence of slang.
- Phonetic and morphosyntactic precision.
- Richness in verb tenses.
- Descriptive vocabulary.
- Utilizes language in all its possibilities.
Semi-Cultured Level
Features include:
- Subjectivity: Frequent use of ‘I’, exclamations, and interjections; subjective syntactic order; use of pleonastic constructions.
- Figurative Language: Exaggerated comparisons, curious metaphors, and an abundance of diminutives and augmentatives.
- Economy of Linguistic Means: Incomplete sentences, omission of adjectives and adverbs, frequent use of ‘que’ as a wildcard, omnibus words, verbal fillers, proverbial language, and linguistic elements referring to extralinguistic context.
- Appeal: Occasional use of ‘you’, imperative mood, and vocatives.
Vulgar Level
The speaker neglects the language due to a lack of instruction, often using slang.
- Phonetic Errors: Includes vowel errors, reduced diphthongs, altered consonant clusters, consonant suppression, ‘gu-‘ unfolding at the beginning of diphthongs (e.g., ‘q’ for ‘cu’), metathesis, agglutination of prepositions with articles, and other alterations.
- Morphosyntactic Errors: Verbal alterations, laísmo, loísmo, leísmo, solecisms, dequeísmo, excessive use of ‘you’, anacoluthon, and over-coordinative constructions.