Linguistic form in communication

Linguistic form serves a variety of functions, but one of its primary functions is to enable communication. 

Communication involves a communicator and a communicatee. Verbal communication is one of the kinds of communication (others occlude gestural, visual, etc) and involves languages.

The two primary media for verbal communication are speech and writing; for clarity here (and to avoid terms like ‘communicatee’).

A speaker produces an utterance and this communicates to the hearer. Communication is successful when the hearer attributed a set of thought to the speaker as her informative intention when the hearer recognizes what the speaker intends to tell him.

These thoughts can have any content whatsoever. Thus for example if the speaker tells the hearer a story, among the thoughts which she communicates are thoughts about the narrated work and its characters and what happens, but she also communicates thoughts about the structure and functions of the story itself – communicating that the story is about to reach its peak, or that there is a shift form one episode to another for example.

Communication can be vague. For example the speaker may say ‘my love is a red rose’. The hearer may use this as evidence that speaker intends to tell him that the loved person is beautiful, precious, will not live forever, and so on: the analogy with a flower means that various characteristics of the flower will be carried over to the loved person.

Successful communication involves the hearer reconstructing some of these thoughts and attributing them to the speaker: the communication is equally with different sets of thoughts.

There is no single tightly constrained set of the meanings intended, just some of meanings which can be inferred from the utterance.
Linguistic form in communication

Communication and Emotion

Communication is possible without words too. And this is largely thanks to the basic emotions every share.

When anthropologists first come onto contact with a previously isolated people, their only means of communication is via facial expressions and bodily gestures, many of which are specifically designed to express emotions.

The anthropologists may smile, an expression that will be recognized immediately by the isolated tribes people.

The tribes people may smile in return, showing that they share the same basic emotional repertoire.

Different cultures have elaborated on this repertoire, exalting different emotions, downgrading others and embellishing the common feelings with cultural nuances, but these differences are more like those between two interpretations of the same musical works, rather than those between different compositions.

Just as two orchestras will play the same symphony slightly differently, so two cultures will play out their emotional repertoire in different tones.

It will be clear to all however, that the score is the same.
Communication and Emotion

Origin of Language Theory

If brain size does not determine language ability, we might ask what other factors led to the first attempts at language. Of course, this is a matter of speculation, since we have no records of early speech.

One theory is that natural sounds used as interjection began to take on more generalized meanings. For example , the English word ‘ouch’ may be uttered by someone who has just been hurt but may then be used to mean “pain” or “the act of hurting oneself” or even “watch out!”

Early languages might have been formed through such expansions of meaning. Natural sounds might have been added to interjections, and these sounds might have developed into vocabulary that was shared by a group of people.

But this theory barely touches on the real question of the origin of language. The more important question is how arbitrary sounds took on meanings that were shared by an entire group of people, and how they were tied to a particular thing or event.

A second theory suggests that language might have been derived from children’s games.

For example, children involved in make-believe battle or hunt may have created new sounds. These sound could have taken on special meanings for the children, just as you and your playmates probably had what you called “secret codes” used as signals for certain activities or objects.

As the children grew up, the sound would have become more useful in actual hunting or in battle, and their use would have spread to other members of the group, gaining standardized meanings in the process.

Although this is just a guest, it is a plausible explanation of how meanings were assigned to sounds. It is easy to imagine how, once the usefulness of this type of communication was evident, it would have been expanded to include a large number of sounds with different meaning.
Origin of Language Theory