1) As a means of communication, related to discourse study, language has two primary functions, those are, transactional and interactional function.

Transactional

Transactional refers to language as a means of conveyance of information. Linguists and linguistic philosophers tend to adopt a limited approach to the function of language in society. While they frequently acknowledge that language may be used to perform many communicative functions, they nonetheless make the general assumption that the most important function of language is the communication of information. In the other words, the emphasize is in the capacity to convey the information, so that the language used by the speaker must be clear and understandable by the hearer. It also means that the content and arrangement of the language used is the focus, the hearer is not the primary concern.

To make our utterance can be understood by the hearer, of course, we have to concern about many aspects of the language, starting from the intonation, pronunciation, diction, grammatical order must be paid attention carefully. Moreover, In this view, the smallest unit of language is sentence, since sentence is considered to be able to carry an adequate information.

Interactional

Interactional refers to language that functions as a means of social relation maintenance. While linguists, philosophers of language, and psycho-linguists have, in general, paid particular attention to the use of language for the transmission of ‘factual or propositional information’, sociologists and sociolinguists have been particularly concerned with the use of language to establish and maintain social relationship. In the other words, in this view the formulation of information is not so important but the interaction. The grammatical rules no longer became the primary concern and can be ignored as long as the hearer can understand what we said.

Imagine that you are sitting in the bus with a stranger next to you. You know exactly that he is holding mobile phone, and of course in it you can find information about the time, but he asks you about the time. Can you guess the true intention of this stranger, Does he truly ask for information about the time? Or he merely wants to open a conversation with you? It seems much more reasonable to suggest that the speaker is indicating a readiness to be friendly and to talk.

2) Language and speech.

The distinction between language and speech was made by Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss scholar usually credited with establishing principles of modern linguistics. Language is a collective body of knowledge, it is a set of basic elements, but these elements can form a great variety of combinations. In fact the number of these combinations is endless. Speech is closely connected with language, as it is the result of using the language, the result of a definite act of speaking. Speech is individual, personal while language is common for all individuals. To illustrate the difference between language and speech let us compare a definite game of chess and a set of rules how to play chess.

Language is opposed to speech and accordingly language units are opposed to speech units. The language unit phoneme is opposed to the speech unit – sound: phoneme /s/ can sound differently in speech - /s/ and /z/). The sentence is opposed to the utterance; the text is opposed to the discourse.

3) What are language features?

Answer:

language features are:

Action verbs

Specific nouns

Activate nouns

Judicious use of adjectives and adverbs

Use the senses

Imagery and Figures of Speech

The Opening Sentence of the Writing

Beginning Sentences

Sentence Structures

Personal Voice

4) The Structure of Language →

Language is a system of symbols and rules that is used for meaningful communication. A system of communication has to meet certain criteria in order to be considered a language:

A language uses symbols, which are sounds, gestures, or written characters that represent objects, actions, events, and ideas. Symbols enable people to refer to objects that are in another place or events that occurred at a different time.

A language is meaningful and therefore can be understood by other users of that language.

A language is generative, which means that the symbols of a language can be combined to produce an infinite number of messages.

A language has rules that govern how symbols can be arranged. These rules allow people to understand messages in that language even if they have never encountered those messages before.

The Building Blocks of Language

Language is organized hierarchically, from phonemes to morphemes to phrases and sentences that communicate meaning.

Phonemes

Phonemes are the smallest distinguishable units in a language. In the English language, many consonants, such as t, p, and m, correspond to single phonemes, while other consonants, such as c and g, can correspond to more than one phoneme. Vowels typically correspond to more than one phoneme. For example, o corresponds to different phonemes depending on whether it is pronounced as in bone or woman. Some phonemes correspond to combinations of consonants, such as ch, sh, and th.

Morphemes

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in a language. In the English language, only a few single letters, such as I and a, are morphemes. Morphemes are usually whole words or meaningful parts of words, such as prefixes, suffixes, and word stems.

Example: The word “disliked” has three morphemes: “dis,” “lik,” and “ed.”

Syntax

Syntax is a system of rules that governs how words can be meaningfully arranged to form phrases and sentences.

Example: One rule of syntax is that an article such as “the” must come before a noun, not after: “Read the book,” not “Read book the.”