Language Functions, Varieties, Levels, and Word Formation

Functions of Language

Language serves multiple functions:

• Expressive/Emotive: Expressing the speaker's attitudes and feelings.
• Conative: Capturing the listener's attention, offering counsel, issuing orders, or influencing.
• Representative: Reporting or describing something.
• Phatic: Verifying that the communication channel remains open.
• Metalinguistic: Using language to explain the language itself (e.g., defining terms).
• Poetic: Utilizing the language's own resources, often found in literary language.

Language and Its Varieties

Language exhibits several types of variation:

• Diatopic (Geographical) Varieties: Features of a language specific to a particular place.
• Diastratic (Social) Varieties: Determined by socio-cultural differences.
• Diasphasic (Functional) Varieties: Motivated by the speaker's situation, the topic of discussion, and the audience.

Language Levels

• Cultured Level: Characterized by a deep understanding of the language and the use of all its resources.
• Medium/Colloquial Level: The most common form used by speakers in everyday life. It appears especially in oral communication and is characterized by dynamism, economy of language resources, and expressiveness.
• Vulgar Level: Marked by incorrectness, lexical poverty, and lack of precision. This includes slang, which can be spontaneous (due to a lack of language knowledge) or intentional (used to achieve a particular purpose).

Slang

Slang is a special use of language related to closed groups, characterized by a specific lexicon associated with a profession or occupation. Slang expresses and reinforces group cohesion. Examples include professional jargon and youth slang.

Word Formation

Simple Words

Simple words can have these structures:

• A lexeme (e.g., "train").
• A lexeme and one or more inflectional morphemes (e.g., "student-s").
• Independent or free morphemes (e.g., "the").

Compound Words

Compound words can be formed by:

• Lexeme + lexeme (e.g., "deaf-mute").
• Free morpheme + free morpheme (e.g., "for + with").
• Free morpheme + lexeme (e.g., "with + out").

Derived Words

Derived words are formed by the union of a lexeme with one or more affixes (e.g., "bloom-ing").

Parasinthetic Words

Parasinthetic words are a special type of derivation:

• Prefixation and suffixation (e.g., "em-bitumen-ar").
• Combination of composition and derivation (e.g., "pica-pedr-ero").

Abbreviations and Acronyms

• Initialisms (e.g., "S.A."): Formed by the union of the initial letters of an expression or phrase. They are written with capitalization and follow grammatical rules.
• Acronyms (e.g., "UFO"): Formed by the union of elements of two or more words. They are written in lowercase and can follow grammatical rules.