Purposes Of Language Essay

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The nature, purposes and uses of language are the most basic information that has to be learnt in order to understand language. Language consists of three aspects, namely ‘sounds’, ‘meaning’ and ‘grammar’ (Bates, 2003). These three components work together to form language as a whole. ‘Sounds’ refer to how words are pronounced, which is studied in Linguistics in its subtopic, phonetics and phonology. ‘Meaning’ refers to how words are given meaning or description, explained in the subtopics semantics and lexicon while ‘grammar’ refers to the rules in which meaning and sounds come together, further explained by morphology and syntax, also subtopics of Linguistics. The three main purpose of language are called the expressive purpose, the informative purpose and the…show more content…
The Great Vowel Shift which Fromkin, Rodman & Hyams (2007) explained in their textbook, ‘An Introduction to Language’ as ‘a major change in English that resulted in new phonemic representations of words and morphemes took place between 1400 and 1600’. In simple words, the Great Vowel Shift is a period in which the sounds of words are changed. Words like ‘mouse’ and ‘house’ were sounded differently than they are now. However, there are still a few words and sounds that still survives from both Old English and Middle English. The last category is developing by borrowing from other languages. Over centuries, this has been done by various languages, some more than others. When a language does not have a word to describe something, they tend to borrow words from other languages that can describe that particular object or subject with alterations to its spelling and pronunciation. English has about three-fifths loanwords, words that are borrowed from other languages (Fromkin, Rodman & Hyams, 2007). Some languages borrow too frequently that only few native words remain while others refrain from borrowing too much to maintain their native

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