Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

freedom of information media n. a widely held principle that citizens have a right to know information of public interest held by their government. Prototypical instances of information in the public interest would be expert advice commissioned, or data collected by governments on scientific, health, safety, legal, commercial or financial matters, especially where this is intended to shape or determine policy. At least 70 governments worldwide have enshrined the principle in legislation. mmo

functions of language LANG n. the purposes which language can be made to serve in different situations. Although we may regard language primarily as a means of making statements that are true or false (the referential function) or as an instrument for the communication of ideas (the ideational function), this is only part of the total picture. Thus, while the referential or ideational functions may be seen as prominent in news reporting, science writing, courtroom testimony and so on, several other functions have come to be identified as important in everyday language use. One well-known account of language function is supplied by Jakobson (1960), who identified the phatic, the regulatory (or ‘conative’, as he called it), the emotive, the aesthetic (or ‘poetic’ as he called it) and the metalinguistic functions as equally deserving of attention. Many situations, for instance, involve a use of language for which issues of truth value are not at stake. Consider, for instance, situations such as telephoning a friend. If you ask ‘How’s things?’ or ‘How are you?’ you are quite likely to be answered, ‘Fine’. Subsequent conversation, of course, may well reveal that your interlocutor has one leg in plaster and can walk only with using crutches. And yet you would not thereby consider the initial response – ‘Fine’ –to be untruthful. This is because we commonly use language not just for articulating ideas but for making and sustaining contact, often using quite ritualised formulae which are almost devoid of content. This use is known as the phatic function of language. Conversations about the weather between relative strangers as but stops in the UK are elaborate exercises in the phatic function.Language is also used to affect the actions and dispositions of others by commands, requests, instructions and other more subtle acts of verbal persuasion. The language of air-traffic control, of advertising and of political campaigns relies heavily on this function, which is known as the regulatory or conative function. In the case of the regulatory function the focus of the language is on the actions and dispositions of the addressee. In contrast to this, language may be used to express the feelings and dispositions of the speaker irrespective of weather of whether an audience is present. This is known as the emotive feelings – language used (sometimes involuntarily) for the expression of feelings. Scratching the paintwork on the car is likely to lead to an outburst of the emotive function. Language may also be used as a source of intrinsic pleasure. Young children learning their first language may derive great pleasure from playing with the sound properties of language, repeating and modulating sound sequences, sometimes without regard for their communicative potential, as in the following sequence between twins aged thirty-three months:

A: zacky sue

B: (laughing) zacky sue zacky sue (both laugh) ah

A: appy

B: olp olt olt

A: oppy oppy

B: appy appy (laughing).

(after Keenan, 1974: 171)

This kind of spontaneous linguistic play occurs amongst children whether on their own or in company right through the period of language development. Not only does it seem integral to the process of learning the first language, it seems not too fanciful to suggest that such activity may form the basis for later poetic uses of language. The general name for this kind of activity is the aesthetic function. More or less self-conscious playing with language operates in differing linguistic domains, involving not only sound-play as in rhyme and alliteration but also punning, ambiguity, grammatical rule-breaking and so on. Nor is it restricted to poetry proper. Advertising, for example, employs language as much in its aesthetic function as in its conative.

Another important, if sometimes overlooked, function is the use of language to explore and reflect upon itself, known as the metalinguistic function. A surprising amount of everyday discourse turns out to be metalinguistic – from the television interviewer’s, ‘Is what you’re saying then Prime Minister . . .?’, to someone in an argument complaining,’ That doesn’t make sense’. Grammar books and dictionaries, of course, rely heavily on the metalinguistic function, as does a book such as this, especially at those moments when it supplies definitions of terms. The notion of function is important in the study of language, principally because it helps to emphasise the way in which language is much more than a tool for thinking with or a vehicle for conveying information. In this way, functional perspectives tend to stress a range of other pressures upon language, and other possibilities for its use, than the need to express some kind of ‘propositional content’ in a strict logical form that may be measured for its truth value. Thus, from a functional perspective, one can claim that language does a great deal more than define and express concepts. Indeed, the linguist Halliday has argued that when children are learning their first language they use it in the first instance much more to affect and interact with their social

environment than to convey information. Halliday’s account of language is generally functionalist in character, being predicated on the claim that many aspects of its organisation are ultimately derived from the functions or purposes that it serves.

The main drawback with the functional perspective is the difficulty of reaching rigorous definitions of the main language functions. Some accounts suggest three; others suggest as many as seven. A more recent approach known as speech act theory focuses more specifically on stipulating in detail a precise range of actions which discrete utterances are capable of performing. MMO