REPÚBLICA BOLIVARIANA DE VENEZUELA

UNIVERSIDAD PEDAGÓGICA EXPERIMENTAL LIBERTADOR

INSTITUTO RAFAEL ALBERTO ESCOBAR LARA DE MARACAY
MAESTRÍA DE ENSEÑANZA DE INGLÉS COMO LENGUA EXTRANJERA

LANGUAGE AND ITS COMPONENTS; AN OVERLOOK ON ITS ISSUES

Author: Santiago Toro.

December 2020
In former, current and future society, a language will always be the foundation of society’s

progress, a cave dweller used it through rudimentary painting and it has evolved up to the use of

memes as a mean to express a common feeling being spread throughout internet. Language in

modern society according to Cambridge University Press (2020) is

“a system of communication consisting of sounds, words, and grammar, or

the system of communication used by people in a particular country or type of work.” Parting

from this definition, it shall be embraced the witnessing of issues being developed in our society,

referring specifically to the Language components, which are divided into three components:

Form, Content and Use (Hoque, 2015).

According to Hoque, Form is broken down onto three branches: Phonology, Morphology and

Syntax. Phonology is conceived as the study of individual sounds and how they are combined to

create different language units (op. cit). Some issues found within linguistics are the

phonological processes that can be traced back to early speaking stages in a child are the sounds

discrimination, which in a few words is the misinterpreting of an idea due to the misusage of the

proper modulating and articulating phonetics in the speaker’s speech, for instance: A Spanish

speaker wishes to express “I brush my teeth, everyday”, but due to the lack of the voiceless

dental fricative consonant sound in the Spanish language an audience may listen: “I brush my

tits, everyday”, thus creating a potential mocking environment for the speaker.

Phonetics is a study, which is derelict for most educational systems that has a high level of

importance, without Phonetics the study of a language turns into a mechanical and archaic

learning system of letter-changes (Sweet, 1908). In other words, Sweet infers that lacking of

Phonetics turns a language learner into an entangled being, guessing its way around at the

moment of pronouncing based upon its native language. This continuous and recurrent chain of
events may have been prevented the picture of a dialect as the “accent” found within a region,

would likely to be eradicated and seen more as a syllabus current.

Tracing back at Hoque’s (2015) second language component: Content, being composed of

Semantics, which is the branch that the studies meanings in a language (Cambridge University

Press, 2020). An issue found within Semantics is a speaker’s limited vocabulary because of the

understatement that a language learning it is just to fulfil a communicating process, but since

society develops under several communicative functions and environments a human interaction

without the proper lexicon may incur to an undesired outcome. This train of thoughts can be

proved in a daily basis: An interviewed candidate not getting a desired language sufficiency

qualification due to reusing one word several times, instead of applying parallelism, replacing

subjects for pronouns, synonyms, figurative speech among others.

According to Hoque’s (Op. cit) third component: Use, that is composed of Pragmatics, also

known as “the study of how language is affected by the situation in which it is used, of

how language is used to get things or perform actions, and of how words can express things that

are different from what they appear to mean” (Cambridge University Press, 2020). A common

issue that relates figurative speech, phrasal verbs with Pragmatics can be found among non-

native English speakers when discerning and decoding messages at moment of using an idiom,

slang or local expression, they can lose their idea, thus leading to have an increased difficulty

staying in topic in a conversation.

 REFERENCES

Cambridge University Press (2020). Cambridge Dictionary.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/es/diccionario/ingles/language
Hoque, M. ,Md. (2015). Components of Language - Dr. M. Enamul Hoque.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327230822_Components_of_Language--
_Dr_M_Enamul_Hoque
Sweet, H. (1908). The Sounds of English: An Introduction to Phonetics. Clarendon
Press. Oxford, England.