ELEMENTS OF LANGUAGE

Generalities
Types of language


Generalities


We distinguish several ways in which grammar is functional:
It has to express our interpretation of the world as we experience it (ideational/representational functional) and it helps us interact with others in order to bring changes to our environment (interpersonal function). In other words, grammar helps us organize our message in order to enable representation and interaction.
The regular patterns of different kinds reflect the uses which a language serves. For example, “declarative”, “interrogative”, “imperative” structural patterns (patterns of the Verb Group) help us to express a multitude of types of social behavior, whereas Nominal Group patterns enable us to encode information about entities: people, events, things, abstractions, etc. If we come to describe patterns involving syntactic categories (Subjects, Objects, Themes, etc) then we expand our analysis beyond the one-to-one relationship between them, to larger units: CONTEXT, CO-TEXT in the speaker-hearer relationship.
Each linguistic element is seen not in isolation but in relation to others, since it has potential to realize different functions. From a multitude of patterns speakers are free to chose those patterns which best convey the message at every stage of their interaction with other speakers.
A communicative/functional grammar is a new direction in grammar writing devoted to the uses of grammar, rather than to grammatical structure, employing a communicative rather than structural approach. The conceptual framework of this grammar is a functional rather than a formal one. It is functional in three closely related senses, in interpretation of texts, of systems and of elements of linguistic structures.
The conventional, traditional method of presenting English grammar in terms of structure, of its constitutive elements has a certain drawback in itself. It discuss elements in their individuality, underlining less the