The message invariably has an effect on its receiver, known as “conative,” no matter what the message contents might be, because the way the addresser delivers it involves such subjective features as tone of voice, individual selection of words, and so on. Dr. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. ———- (2003). Brown, E. J. domain-specific vocabulary, language functions, and discourse (rhetorical) structures in. Its dynamism and fluidity are exemplified in politics, conflict resolution, education, governance, religion, and many other areas of human endeavour. When we combine specific sounds in another form, they produce yet another meaning e.g. Uploaded by. Their essential persuasive efficacy works its magic on every person in every society. Language can never be 'neutral' because it bridges our personal and social worlds," (Henry and Tator 2002). A good example is from the opening lines of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way−−in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. Osisanwo, W. (1999). (2006). Language Attitude and Language Conflict in West Africa. As shown in Table 2, it summarizes the frequency and distribution of language functions in children's classroom talk. Social Functions of language / Discourse and society Language has several social functions. Discourse Analysis. “Language Structure and Language Functions.” In Lyons, J. Series: Studies in Pragmatics, Volume: 12. A transcript will make it easier to identify the types of questions in the data and t… Language is the veritable means of transmitting the cultural heritage of any speech community. Language and literature. A Tale of Two Cities. Brown (1992:13) notes: “the fact that when we create words we use our breath, and for these people and these traditions breath is associated with the principle of life; breath is life itself. According to Kern (1995), CMC helps learners to produce more sentences and a much greater variety of discourse functions when working in CMC environment. Fasold, R. (1990). This poetic function of language can be used when one says “Alexander the Great“, instead of “the great Alexander”, which essentially has the same meaning. Examples from our text which is rich in the use of proverbs, symbolism, parallelism, innuendoes etc. people engaging in environmental discourse would generally be expected to be concerned with protecting the environment rather than wasting resources). They are: the mystical function and the economising function. Christodoulou N. (2009). As Douglas (2001) points out, discourse analysis is the examination of language used by the members of a speech community which involves looking at both language form and language function. The discourse function of a sentence depends on the context, for example Can you give me a call? In other words, it establishes, acknowledges, or reinforces social relations; it is the communicative acts that fulfil an exclusively social function, acts that serve to confirm ‘ties of union,’ such as the more or less formal inquiry about one’s health, remarks about the weather, or comments about trivial matters. Defining function: The word function is often used in different senses in the literature of linguistics: In sociological studies of language, function is often used to refer to the role language plays in society. It is concerned with the way texts hang together in terms of cohesion and coherence.” Stubbs (1983:1) as cited by Alo (2006:19) defines discourse as: The organisation of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore…larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts.