2. Functions of language

Functions of language

1. to communicate, give an information and ask for it

2. exchange facts and ideas

3. mantaining social relationships

• Experiment – 4 male roomates were from different parts – they were recording their speech, after a year their accents and their perception of speech sounds became more similar

• Consequence – it’s easy to recognise who speak like you (even when you don’t know them) and treat them as „your folks“

1. It is a way to present your identity

2. Make people to cooperate with you

3. Reasoning (as the instrument of thought)

4. Expressing emotions

5. Esthetic feelings about language (poems, rap can make a pleasure to us)

The origin of language

• Emerged ca 100 000 years ago

• The beginning of „behavioral modernity“ = clothes, making houses, pots, artefacts

Why language may have started?

• Shrouded in mystery

• But it was a big thing to speak, it made their life easier

Theories of 20th century about L origin

• The mama theory – L evolved from the easisest syllables attached to the most significant objects

• The pooh-pooh theory – L evolved from the instinctive calls (pain, joy, surprise)

• The sins-sing theory – L began as passionate „love songs“ – mating sounds, sexual advertisement

Comment on these theories

• Maybe more about primitve communative systém before language in the modern sense developer

• These all theories assume that language started simple and gradually became elaborated

• And assume that it was a mish-mash wich slowly neatened itself into a coherent systém

• They are not theories but speculations, not based on empirical observation

• When we want to observe empirically, we need to look at physiology, fossils, or creation of language now

A pidgin

• A simplified L that develops (usually from at least one full-fledged L) as a means of communication between people with no common L

• Nobody’s native L

Creolization

• Parents communicate in pidgin, it becomes the child’s first L

• Once it’s people’s first L, it blossoms > a creole

• Creoles (even unrelated) often develop in similar ways (human beings are linguistically preprogrammed/ using general intelligence for solving the same problems in similar ways)