| Lemma | language |
|---|---|
| Categoria grammaticale | N |
| Lingua | inglese |
| Sigla | Martinet (1962) |
| Titolo | A Functional View of Language |
| Sinonimi | |
| Rinvii | |
| Traduzioni | |
| Citazioni | […] linguists have lately been repeating that a language is a structure, or maybe, a structure of structures, and if this is true, we should expect to find inner connexions extending from one end of the complex to the other end. This would be true if a language were one of these tools or machines that works with perfect accurancy and without any appreciable delay in trasmission. But this is not the case. As we shall see later, every language retains, features which result from its functioning several millennia ago […]. […] the whole of language, as represented by corresponding speech, could be exhaustively reduced to successions of monemes and phonemes. We have simply said that what we want to call a language makes use of monemes and phonemes; whether it adds to them other tricks which may at times blur or distort some features of double articulation is another matter. All of this points to a definition of ‘language’ which might run follow: A language is a medium of communication according to which human experience is analysed, differently in each community, into units (monemes) with a semantic content and phonic shape. This phonic shape, in its turn, is articulated in distinctive and successive units (phonemes) whose number and mutual relations also vary from language to language. This means that we should reserve the term language for a medium of communication which is doubly articulated and whose outward manifestation is vocal. Apart from this common core, nothing can be said to be linguistic which cannot differ from one language to another. This is how we should understand Saussure’s dictum that in a given language is fixed and whose nature linguistic features are arbitrary and conventional. It is clear that this formulation, in spite of its unwieldy length, does not list all the types of features that may enter the fabric of language. We may even be sure that it does not include elements which probably play some role in all known languages. All this points to a fundamental feature of human language: its variation from one community to another and its variation through time […] Language varies because it suits the varying needs of man. It follows that any feature of speech that is automatically found in all communities must be considered non linguistic or, at best, marginally so. At every stage, the structure of language is nothing but the unstable balance between the needs of communication, which require more numerous and more specific units, each of them of comparatively rare occurrence, and man’s inertia, which favours less numerous, less specific, and more frequently occurring units. It is the interplay of these two main factors that constitutes the essentials of linguistic economy. We shall therefore concentrate on language as a communicative tool, since this use of language gives it a form likely to be imitated in all its other uses. It is not difficult to understand the reasons of the common illusion that one’s language is stable and homogeneous: people tend to identify language and its written form, and would naturally think that nothing changes as long as spelling has not budged; as a rule they do not and cannot remember how they spoke ten or twenty years before; everyone is used to and considers normal many forms and turns which himself never uses, but which he seems always to have heard […]. Language is an institution. A language is a set of habits that the child–or the adult in the case of a second language–acquires by imitation of those who surround him. This leave us without definition of what it is our duty and our aim to investigate, namely human language properly so called in its different forms, the language as actually spoken by men […] We should rather try to determine what all the languages we know, all the communicative instruments we want to call ‘languages’, really have in common, so that we would not be willing to call ‘language’ some semiotic system which did not present the minimum. Languages serve many purposes. They certainly help us to think. They give us an outlet for our pent-up feelings. We use them as artistic mediums. But they are first and foremost used for communication, i.e the transmission of experience from one person to another. |