WORDS AND COMMUNICATION

Speakers acquire the rules and structures of their mother tongue

unconsciously and internalized. By the age of four not only have they
already mastered complex and abstract sequences, but they are also
capable of producing utterances that they haven’t heard or said before.
Although we are not conscious about that, we can recognize a mistake
when someone has used these rules mistakenly.
Language can be regarded as a system consisting on rules that are acquired by
interaction. Those rules make the meaning intelligible for both speaker and hearer.
These are not strict rules as it leaves room for creativity.

Farb, in his book “ What happens when people talk”, compares language to a game
played with a fixed number of pieces, although the appearance of these pieces may
change from one language to another.

The smallest meaningful unit of a language is called a “phoneme”(the sound of a

letter).Phonemes are representatives of morphemes in speech. Morphemes are
defined as the smallest meaningful unit of writing.

The English language has 45 phonemes: 21 consonants, 9 vowels, 4 semivowels, 4

stresses, 4 pitches, 1 juncture (pause between words), and 3 terminals contours
(ending of a sentence). By combining them one can produce an infinite number of
utterances.

Words shape our culture as is is through language that we can express culture and
politics.

Francisco Yus was a representative of the “relevance theory”, which claims that
addressees when decoding have a wide range of possible interpretations, and it is their
responsibility to choose the suitable one. Unlike what traditional theories of
codification – decodification stated, this theory puts emphasis on the activity of
inference. To “infer” means to “read between the lines of the speaker’s intentions”.