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Humans can use language to talk about language. Also a very defining feature of human language, reflexiveness is a trait not shared by animal communication. With reflexiveness, humans can describe what language is, talk about the structure of language, and discuss the idea of language with others using language.
Standard language is a variety promoted by some social group, either officially or unofficially, as the preferred form. Abstand and ausbau languages are concepts developed by sociolinguists to describe related language varieties, ranging from dialects of a single language to distinct languages.
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation (e.g., more than one way of pronouncing the same phoneme or the same word), lexicon (e.g., multiple words with the same meaning), grammar (e.g., different syntactic constructions expressing the same grammatical function), and ...
Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. [1]
Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions like "and" that serve to join two sentences, articles that introduce a noun, interjections such as "wow!", or ideophones like "splash" that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have positionals that describe the spatial position of an event or entity.
Theory of language is a topic in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. [1] It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; [2] [3] "Why do languages have the properties they do?"; [4] or "What is the origin of language?". In addition to these fundamental questions, the theory of language also seeks to understand ...
The six factors of an effective verbal communication. To each one corresponds a communication function (not displayed in this picture). [1] Roman Jakobson defined six functions of language (or communication functions), according to which an effective act of verbal communication can be described. [2] Each of the functions has an associated factor.
There are many different ways of defining and arranging features into feature systems: some deal with only one language while others are developed to apply to all languages. [ 1 ] Distinctive features are grouped into categories according to the natural classes of segments they describe: major class features, laryngeal features, manner features ...