Tema-1 “ LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION: ORAL AND WRITTEN ...

8. Arbitrariness: there is no depency between the element of the signal and the nature of
the reality to which it refers.
9. Discreetness: speech uses a small set of found elements that clearly contrast with each
other.
10. Displacement: it is possible to talk about events remote in space or time from the
situation of the speaker.
11. Productivity: there is an infinitive capacity to express and understand meaning, by using
old sentence elements to produce new elements.
12. Traditional transmission: language is transmitted from a generation to the next by a
process of teaching and learning.
13. Duality of patterning: the sounds of language have no intrinsic meaning, but combine in
different ways to form elements, such as words, that do convey meaning.
* After having studied the main properties of language, and communication, we will now see
how the learning of a language involves a Social Process.
The most usual answer to the question of “why we use language” is to communicate our
ideas, and this ability to communicate or communicative competence will be studied in the
next part. But it would be wrong to think of communicating our ideas as the only aim for