Arbitrary relationship between the sound of a moroheme and its meaning.

Arbitrariness at the syntactic level.

Arbitrariness and covention

having two levels of structures, such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the seconfary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization.

language is hierarchical

language is resourceful because of ite duality and its recursiveness.

human languages ​​enable their users to sumbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of communication.

benefits huamn beings by giving them the power to handle generalizations and adstractions

Once we can talk about physically distant thig, we acquire the ability to understand concepts which denote "non-things," such as truth and beauty.

The ability to use language to talk about lanuage

Human language can be used to talk about itself

In primitive times people imitated the sounds of the animal calls in the wild environment they lived and speech developed from that.

In the life of our primitive ancestors, they utter instinctive sounds pain,anger and joy.

As primitive people worked together, they produced some rhythmic grunts which gradually developed into chants and then into language.

Emotive

Referential

Poetic

Phatic

Metallingual

Conative

Language is the instrument of thought and people often feel they need to speak their thoughts aloud, for instance, when they are working on math problem. The use of language to record the facts is a prerequisite of social development. This is indeed a crucial function of language.

refers to function enacts social relationships

language has the function of reflecting relationships between people.

to build and maintain relationship of all kinds

reflects our social identity and status

to judge and evaluate things

is primarily to change the social status of [peoples, as in marriage ceremonies, the sentencing of criminals, the blessing of children, the naming of a ship at a launching ceremony, and the cursing of enemied. The kind of language employed in perdormative verbal acts is usually quite formal and even ritualized.

is one of the most powerful uses of language because it is crucial in changing the emotional status of an audience for or against someone or something.

small, seemingly meaningless expressions to maintain a comfortable relationship between people without involving any factual content.

often overlooked

no one will deny the use of language for the hearty joy of using

be used to talk about itself

This makes the language infinitely self-reflexive: We human beings can talk about talk and think about thinking, and thus only humans can ask what it means to communicate, to think, to be human.

The distinction lies in prescribing how things ought to be and describing how things are.

the linguistic tried to discover and record the rules to which the members of a language community actually conform and does not seek to impose upon them other reles, or norms, of correctness.

In the 18th century, all the main European languages ​​were studied prescriptively.

A Synchronic description takes a fixed instant (usually, but not necessarily, the present) as its point of observation.

Saussure's diachronic linguistic is the study of a language through the course of its history.

Saussure distinguished the linguistic competene of the speakers and the actual phenomena or data of linguistics as ; langue and parole.

A language user's underlying knowledge about the system of rules is called his linguistic competence.

performance refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations.

A speaker's competence is stable while his performance is often influenced by psychological and social factors. So as speaker's performance does not always match his supposed competence.

Ethnic background

socioeconomic status

region of the country

physical state (intoxication, fatigue, distracion, illness) vary from individual to individual)