important lessons

Verbal communication | Definition and types

 English linguistics


Verbal communication


There are two major codes of communication: verbal and non-verbal. In this chapter, we consider verbal communication. Verbal communication is essential in the seven contexts of communication that we have previously considered. We explore its components and how it functions in our lives.


What is verbal communication?

Verbal communication may be defined as the process of using LANGUAGE (both spoken and written) to create meanings. The key word in this definition is ‘language.’ So, what is ‘language’?


Language may be defined as a collection of words or symbols with arbitrary meanings that are governed by rules and used to communicate. Language consists of words or symbols that REPRESENT things without being those things themselves. 

For example, the word ‘bicycle’ is a symbol (a sequence of letters or sounds) for a two-wheeled vehicle that you sit on and move by turning two pedals, but the symbol (the word) is not the object itself. The word ‘walk’ is, also, a symbol for the action of moving on foot, but the word is not the action itself.  The word ‘handsome’ is a symbol for the quality of being physically attractive but it is not the quality itself. This means that human language is characterized by semanticists, i.e. the use of symbols to ‘mean’ or to refer to objects, actions, states, and qualities.


Human language has rules.

Language is a system in that it is not a disorganized mass of sounds or symbols but is instead an intricate network of rules. Linguistics, which is the scientific study of language, seeks to explicitly formulate the various rules that make up language. These rules are organized into levels:


    Level of language                                                              Branch of language study


1-Speech sounds and the way they pattern in a language   Phonetics and phonology

2-The constituent structures of words                                     Morphology

3-The way words combine with other                                       Syntax

   words to form phrases, clauses, and sentences

5-The meaning of words, fixed expressions, and sentences     Semantics

6-The meaning of language in context                                                Pragmatics

7-The way any connected piece of speech or writing is structured      Discourse analysis/Text                                                                                                                               linguistics/ conversation analysis


Human language fulfils diverse functions:

Language may be put to various purposes. We often tend to assume that the function of language is communicating, but what does communicating entail or involve? Language serves a number of diverse functions. Here are some of the functions of language which have been distinguished. Humans may use language to:


Transfer or pass on facts or information about the world to other people, persuade other people to do something or follow a certain course of action, entertain or amuse oneself or other people, express membership in a particular social group, express one’s individuality, express one’s mood and emotion, maintain good social contact with other people's construct mental representations of the world.

 

All these functions are important, and it is difficult to argue that some of them are more important, or more primary, than others.


 

Human language has distinct properties:

What are some of the special properties of human language that make of it a unique system of communication? In the 1960s, Charles Hockett, the American linguist, has suggested a number of design features of human language. We consider some of them here.


Verbal communication



Productivity:

Humans Beings, in their languages use, continually create new expressions and novel utterances by manipulating their linguistics resources to describe new objects and situations. This property is called productivity (or “creativity” or “open-endedness”). It is the capacity of language users to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of new sentences which they have never heard before. It is suggested as a defining property of human language. It essentially means that the potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite (subject to no limitation and, therefore, immeasurably great).


Displacement:

Displacement is a property which has been suggested as a defining feature of human language. Displacement refers to the ability to refer to objects, events, actions, states, processes, states of affairs that are removed in space and time, i.e. which are not part of the immediate setting in space and time. 


# For example: The people can talk about how they felt last week comparing with this week or how they would love things to change in the future.


Displacement is also related to being able to talk about things that are absent or non-existent through the use of the negative. For example, a person can say how he or she does not feel (My throat doesn’t hurt) as well as how he or she feels (but my nose is really stuffed up.)


Displacement also allows humans to talk about things and places having a fictitious existence (such as creatures and events in myths).


Cultural transmission:

While we may inherit physical feature from our father and mother, we do not inherit their languages. We obtain a language in a culture with other speakers and not from parental genes. That processes whereby a language is passed on from one generation to the next is described as cultural transmission. It is clear that humans' beings are born with some type of predisposition to obtain languages in a general sense. Whatever, we are not born with the ability to produce and understand utterances in a specific language such as English or French. We acquire our first languages as children in a culture. Cultural transmission indicates that humans being hand down their languages from one generation to another. Human being infants, grow up in isolation, produce no “instinctive” languages. Cultural transmission of a specific languages is crucial in the human being acquisition process.


Reflexivity:

In every language it is possible to speaking about speech, that is, to use languages to be communicating about the activity of using languages. Such uses of languages are reflexive in nature.


This property of language is called "Reflexivity". The property of reflexivity (or “reflexives”) accounts for the fact that we can use languages to think, comment and talk about languages itself, making it one of the distinguishing features of human being languages. Surly, without this general ability, we wouldn’t be able to reflect on or identify any of the other distinct properties of human languages.


Speech is permeated by reflexive activity as speakers remark on language, report utterances, describe aspects of the speech event, and guide listeners in the proper interpretation of their utterances. Reflexivity is so pervasive and essential that we can say that languages is by fundamentally and nature reflexive. This reflexive capacity forms the base of the power of languages both in everyday life and in scholarly research. Examples of reflexivity include comments on languages such as:


  1. I wish she wouldn’t use so many technical terms.
  2. I didn’t mean to sound so harsh.
  3. I wish I haven’t said that.
  4. I think you misunderstood what I was saying.


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