The Functions of Language

Language can be used to command, to describe facts, to express feelings. The variegated purposes of language is what makes it such a powerful tool. According to the Russian linguist, Roman Osipovich Jakobson, language serves six functions.

The six functions

1. Referential Function: Language serves to convey factual information or referring to objects, events, or concepts in the external world. It aims to communicate objective statements or descriptions. I also call this the descriptive function.

2. Expressive Function: This function of language emphasizes the expression of the speaker's emotions, attitudes, or subjective states. It serves to convey the speaker's feelings, opinions, or personal experiences. This is also known as the emotive function.

3. Conative Function: The conative function of language is centered around influencing or directing the behavior of the listener or audience. It aims to persuade, command, request, or provoke a response from the recipient of the message. I sometimes call this the prescriptive function because such statements take the form of prescriptions, imperatives or commands.

4. Phatic Function: This function emphasizes the social aspects of language and focuses on establishing or maintaining social relationships and communication channels. It is concerned with greetings, small talk, or other language expressions used to initiate or sustain social interaction.

5. Metalinguistic Function: The metalinguistic function refers to language's ability to discuss or refer to language itself. It involves using language to analyze, describe, or clarify linguistic concepts, rules, or structures.

6. Poetic Function: The poetic function of language highlights the aesthetic or artistic aspects of communication. It emphasizes the creative and expressive use of language, such as in poetry, literature, or rhetoric, where the form, rhythm, sound patterns, and figurative language play a significant role.

Discussion

In this discussion, I hope to cast a critical light on Jakobson’s taxonomy of the functions or purposes of language. Firstly, I question the distinction he makes between the referential function and the expressive function of language. Are these two functions truly distinct? Might there not be an underlying unity between the referential and expressive functions of language? After all, isn’t a referential sentence simply an expression of a reference? Similarly, does an expressive sentence not refer to a state of the world, albeit, an internal state? What I am trying to draw attention to is that both of these types of sentences are truth-apt. Take for example, the sentences “Anwar Ibrahim is the Prime Minister of Malaysia” and “I am anxious”. At first glance, it might seem like these two sentences are different types of sentences. The first is stating a fact and the second is expressing an emotion. But I argue that both sentences share one important property in common: truth-aptness. A sentence is truth-apt if it can express either a true or false proposition. An example of a sentence that is not truth-apt is “Go clean the dishes”. Such a sentence is a command and does not have truth-conditional semantics. There are no conditions under which the sentence “Go clean the dishes” can be said to be true or false. In other words, commands lack truth conditions because commands do not function to express truth. Back to our example, “Anwar Ibrahim is the Prime Minister of Malaysia” is a proposition with truth conditions. This is obvious, so I won’t belabour the point too much. On the other hand, “I am anxious” might not seem like a truth-apt sentence since it is seen to merely express emotions and emotions do not have truth conditions. However, I disagree with this assertion because as I see it, “I am anxious” is a proposition which does have truth conditions. One can imagine an person interpreting the signals (increased heart rate, rising blood pressure, increased breath intake) that are coming from their body variably as anxiety or excitement. In other words, a person reading their body signals could misread their internal state and give a false report of their emotions. “I am anxious” is potentially a false statement. In other words, what I am proposing is truth conditions for emotional reporting or emotional expressions do exist and failure to fulfil these conditions could be due to a lack of affective literacy in accurately referring to one’s emotions. To put it in another way, expressing one’s emotions is a type of fact statement. Except in this case, the fact pertains to an agent’s internal state-of-affairs rather than to a state-of-affairs external to the agent. Of course to caveat this, emotions or internal state-of-affairs have one important distinction from external state-of-affairs which is that emotions are partially constructed in the process of referring, predicting or describing them. Unlike truthful statements of external facts, statements of internal facts can be true if one wants it to be true. Emotive sentences and emotional utterances exercise a unique capacity to alter what they “refer” to or what they “represent”—a capacity which makes them neither “constative”¹ nor “performative”² utterances but a third type of communicative utterance entirely, one that has never received adequate theoretical attention. Emotional utterances are similar to performatives, as described by J. L. Austin, because, like performatives, they are a way to “do things with words.” But they differ from performatives because of the unpredictability of their outcome. What the historian William Reddy proposed to call “emotives” in his book “Navigation of Feeling”.

The seventh function

In addition to the six functions proposed by Jakobson, I would posit that language serves a seventh purpose: The Interrogative Function — the function of language to ask questions. It asks interlocutors something or requests information (as opposed to a descriptive sentence which tells us something or gives information). Interrogative sentences require an answer. In English, an interrogative sentence uses interrogative functions such as what, which, when, where, who, whom, whose, why, whether and how.

1. pertaining to an utterance (such as an assertion) that is capable of being judged true or false.

2. performative utterances are sentences which not only describe a given reality, but also change the reality they are describing