Language functions are the socio-cognitive processes of the human’s Neuro-Semantic Language Learning System.
The socio (social) piece is the way that a person uses language to communicate with and to other people. And, the
cognitive piece is the way a person thinks.
Semantic relationships
basis of language, for all speakers, for all languages, consists of the meaning of those
relationships about people, their actions, and their objects within a context or setting.
Socially, children communicate about themselves in
relationship to their environment.
Cognitively, children think only about the way
they act in relationship to the objects in their
world.
These semantic relationships function to connect the
child to his or her world and the child’s world to the
child’s thinking.
Language function
These
structures
include:
words
sounds
vocabulary
morphemes
phonemes
sentences
parts of speech
sentence order
sentence structures
English speakers typically study
language from a structural
perspective
Extended semantic relationships
Changes by extension or restriction of meanings The specialization
law says that a generic word next to a specifying word becomes a
specified word. This fact is only possible in a certain social
environment. This law is related to the principle of economy of all
languages.
Expanend language functions
Displacement
Refering their actions in the here -and-now to refering
to acts that are not seen or touched is another type of
language functions
Speech acts
Include the rules for the context verbal and non-verbal
characteristics of the speakers utterance and the effects and the
listener
Expanden speech acts
As speakers engage in discourse the language functions of the
speech acts generate more and more meaning for the speakers and
the listeners
Redundancy
Try to ise more words to convey a particular
meaning
Concrete cognition
These complex concepts increase the language functions of
displacement, semanticity, flexibility, productivity and
redundancy
Semanticity
complexity or semanticity increases over the life
of a person so concepts increase in meaning
and new meanings continue to develop
Flexibility
To use language to think about her options and to
problems solve provides
Productivity
The language user has more than one way to use
language production