The role of language in human society. Topic: The role of language in the development of society

Language is a peculiar set of sounds and symbols, each of which has a certain meaning. Language is an important tool for human interaction and communication. Thanks to language, we can express our thoughts in a material speech form. Language is not only a means of communication, it is also the historical memory of every nation. Each language reflects the spiritual culture, the centuries-old history of each nation. language communication symbol

Language is a social phenomenon, because outside social relations it is impossible to master them. A person does not have the gift of speech from the moment of birth. After all, a small child begins to speak only when he succeeds in learning to repeat the phonetic sounds that the people around him make, and thanks to the ability to think, he gives them the correct meaning.

The emergence of language

At the first stages of its origin, the language was inarticulate sounds made by primitive people and was accompanied by active gestures. Later, with the advent of Homo sapiens, language takes on an articulate form, thanks to his ability to think abstractly.

Thanks to language, primitive people began to exchange experiences and plan their joint actions. Articulate language brought ancient people to a new stage of their evolutionary development, and became another factor that could bring a person to a more highest level from other biological species.

Also during this period, the language is given a mystical coloration, ancient people believed that certain words have magical properties that help stop an impending natural disaster: this is how the first magic spells appear.

Language as a means human communication

Human language is an amazing, unique miracle. Well, what would we, people, cost without language? It is simply impossible to imagine us as speechless. After all, it was language that helped us stand out from the animals. Scientists have known this for a long time. The two most important features of language, more precisely, two of its functions, were once pointed out by Lomonosov: the function of communication between people and the function of forming thoughts.

Language is defined as a means of human communication. This is one of possible definitions language is the main thing, because it characterizes the language not from the point of view of its organization, structure, etc., but from the point of view of what it is intended for. There are other means of communication as well. An engineer can communicate with a colleague without knowing his native language, but they will understand each other if they use blueprints. Drawing is usually defined as international language technology. The musician conveys his feelings with the help of a melody, and the listeners understand him. The artist thinks in images and expresses it with lines and colors. And all these are “languages”, so often they say “the language of the poster”, “the language of music”. But this is another meaning of the word language.

Development of language and development of society

Language development is inextricably linked with the development of society. Language is a living organism that is influenced by historical, political and social changes in the life of the public.

Language. Its functions. Communication

The language of any nation is its historical memory, embodied in the word. The thousand-year-old spiritual culture, the life of the people are reflected in the language, in its oral and written forms, in the monuments of various genres in a peculiar and unique way. And, therefore, the culture of the language, the culture of the word appears as an inseparable bond of many, many generations.

Language can be defined as a system of communication carried out with the help of sounds and symbols, the meanings of which are conditional, but have a certain structure. language society communication

Language is a social phenomenon. It cannot be mastered outside of social interaction, i.e. without interacting with other people. Although the process of socialization is largely based on the imitation of gestures - nodding, smiling and frowning - language is the main means of transmitting culture. Another important feature of it is that it is almost impossible to forget how to speak in the native language if its main vocabulary, the rules of speech and structure are learned at the age of eight or ten, although many other aspects of a person's experience may be completely forgotten. This indicates a high degree of adaptability of the language to human needs; without it, communication between people would be much more primitive.

Language includes rules. There is right and wrong speech. The language has many implied and formal rules that determine how words can be combined to express the desired meaning. At the same time, deviations from grammatical rules are often observed, associated with the peculiarities of various dialects and life situations.

When using a language, it is necessary to follow its basic grammatical rules. Language organizes the experience of people. Therefore, like the whole culture as a whole, it develops generally accepted meanings. Communication is possible only if there are meanings that are accepted, used by its participants and understood by them. In fact, our communication with each other in Everyday life largely due to our confidence that we understand each other.

The main functions of the language are realized by its native speakers on an intuitive level. Speech experience, language practice provide knowledge about the language, the rules of its use, the laws of its functioning in speech.

The basic functions of language are communication, cognition and influence. Language is always good, speech or a native speaker can be bad, creating from good language bad speech. Any language, accumulating experience folk life in all its fullness and diversity, is also his actual consciousness. Each new generation, each representative of a particular ethnic group, mastering the language, joins through it to the collective experience, collective knowledge about the surrounding reality, generally accepted norms of behavior, assessments rejected or accepted by the people, social values. It follows from this that language cannot but influence the experience of a particular individual, his behavior, culture. Under explicit or implicit influence literary language, its institutions, traditions are all spheres of human life, and its success to a large extent depends on the language environment in which a person lives, how he mastered his native language.

The unconscious need of the individual for literacy, imposed from above, democratizing speech behavior, has become the basis of speech permissiveness, has led to the fact that the modern language life of society is marked by the loss of value language guidelines. The language ability of a person is considered in psycholinguistics as a mechanism that provides speech activity. Speech activity associated with the use of language is one of the most important in human life - a thinking, thinking, knowing, communicating, reasoning, explaining, arguing, persuading being.

Speech communication in all its forms, types, genres, types allows a person to receive ready-made social experience, meaningful and systematized by previous generations. Communication, like any human activity, has a number of incentives. Among them - the knowledge of the surrounding world, the knowledge of oneself and as a result of knowledge - the adjustment of one's behavior.

Communicating with each other, people use words and use the grammatical rules of a particular language. Language is a system of verbal signs, a means by which communication is carried out between people. Speech is the process of using language to communicate with people. Language and speech are inextricably linked, they represent a unity, which is expressed in the fact that historically the language of any nation was created and developed in the process of speech communication between people. The connection between language and speech is also expressed in the fact that language as an instrument of communication exists historically as long as people speak it. As soon as people stop using this or that language in speech communication, it becomes dead language. Such a dead language has become, for example, Latin.

The role of the Russian language in human life and society

Russian is the state language Russian Federation and therefore the whole life of the state and society without it is unthinkable.

In the Russian Federation, all official documents are written in Russian, without which the state cannot exist: texts of laws and various orders, job applications and questionnaires, explanatory notes and reports. All these documents must be written clearly and unambiguously, and every citizen of the country must be able to read such documents and, if necessary, draw them up himself. Presidential addresses are announced in Russian and parliamentary debates are heard - therefore, any citizen, if he wants to be active, informed member of society must be able to understand quite complex texts by ear. Teaching is conducted in Russian educational institutions countries. Therefore, knowing well Russian language, a citizen of Russia - regardless of nationality - fully enjoys all the benefits that the state can provide him. In addition, in our multinational state, knowledge of the Russian language provides a person with the opportunity to communicate freely with people of all nationalities.

However, language can be learned in different ways. One person, stumbling on every word, with difficulty expresses a more or less complex thought. Another is able to write a brilliant, persuasive article. A good knowledge of the Russian language for any person living on the territory of our country, and especially for someone who is in a state or socially significant service (officials, journalists), is a manifestation of respect for the state and society, and nationality does not matter here. Can there be tongue-tied parliamentarians or ambiguously interpreted laws and documents? They can, but they shouldn't! By the way, in France, any official applying for a position takes an exam for knowledge of the French language; the president is even being tested publicly.

Unfortunately, our society, including the educated part of it, does not yet understand how important it is for everyone and everyone to have an impeccable command of the language, which is native for most of us. Since childhood, we have been speaking, thinking and expressing our thoughts on it, with its help we get to know the world and join Russian and world culture. And, perhaps, the habitual, everyday life of the Russian language prevents many of us from realizing that our command of it is far from perfect. But the better we know how to use it, the more we can achieve: the ability to expressively speak and write often becomes the key to professional success, to winning the sympathy of others. Having learned to understand, analyze any text and all its subtexts, a person will not succumb to unscrupulous advertising or political demagogy, will not allow himself to be manipulated.

The system of language norms and a developed society

The faster the changes in the culture and way of life of the people, the faster the vocabulary of the language and the compatibility of words change. Of course, speed here is a relative concept: with a slow pace of language development, changes within the life of one generation are generally imperceptible, with an increase in the pace, a person is able to notice that 20 years ago “they didn’t say that”. The conscious variability of the language is perceived painfully: the older generation feels discomfort in communicating with the younger, the younger generation is reluctant to read books. A serious gap between linguistic generations could lead to the loss of national and cultural identity. Therefore, in any sufficiently developed society, the immutability of the language is artificially maintained. The idea of immutability is embodied in a system of various language norms.

Spelling rules are fixed in spelling dictionaries, and punctuation - in reference books. The orthoepic dictionary shows pronunciation norms and the most significant grammatical features. AT explanatory dictionary the lexical norm is reflected, in the grammatical marks that are available in any dictionary entry, there is information about the features of the declension or conjugation of the word, partly also about its syntactic compatibility (in an implicit form, this information is also contained in illustrative examples).

Society maintains the immutability of language in various ways. One of the main ones is a standardized education system. At school, children, among other things, get an idea of the language norms. By encouraging the best students, society creates an idea of the importance of knowledge, and in particular - correct speech. Participate in the formation of our ideas about the correct speech and the media. special role called to play fiction, the best examples of which, written by masters of the word, sometimes set the language standard for several generations of readers.

Since the 1990s, our country has been living in conditions of social and linguistic instability. Language norms are shaken, and the existence of the Russian literary language in its former form is under threat. The objectively prevailing conditions are such that the natural social support literary language does not.

Firstly, live broadcast on radio and television, by virtue of the peculiarities of colloquial speech, excludes the observance of many language norms (errors in stress, in verb control, repetitions, etc. are inevitable). Second, the situation has changed publishing: Printed products have long become a source of income, not knowledge. Books are published very quickly and in maximum economy mode, which is why the quality suffers (even in school textbooks and children's literature there are not just typos, but outright spelling errors - let alone entertainment literature or periodicals). Thirdly, the creative elite (writers, directors, critics), in pursuit of absolute freedom of creativity, excluded the normativeness of language and the elegance of speech from the list of virtues of books, plays and films. Fourthly, on the political Olympus, the correctness of speech is not considered as an integral part of a positive image: it is enough to recall the orthoepic characteristics of M.S. Gorbachev or semantic and syntactic features of V.S. Chernomyrdin.

And only the education system is trying to preserve the traditional speech culture of Russia, and this imposes a special responsibility on both school teachers and university teachers, and on every person who receives higher education. Of course, laws can be enacted to prohibit the release of printed matter without proofreading, publishers can be fined for spelling errors, and the media for obscene language, but repressive actions of this kind will inevitably lead to the fact that violation of language norms will be associated for many citizens with the idea freedom of the individual. So, apparently, the only way to preserve the Russian language as the language of civilization, science and culture is to help a person receiving an education to understand that an impeccable command of the Russian language makes him an aristocrat of the spirit, a person capable of thinking analytically, feeling deeply, expressing his thoughts and feelings, to convince others, to succeed.

>>Russian language: The role of language in society. Complete Lessons

Topic: The role of language in society

The purpose of the lesson: The value of language in human life and society.

Lesson type: Educational.

Language in human life.

Language is a means and material of formation and formation personalities man, his intellectual, will, feelings and form of being. Language is a continuous process of knowing the world, mastering it by a person. Language is a means of communication between people, transferring one's own experience to others and enriching the experience of others. Language contributes to the identification and satisfaction of the material and spiritual needs of people, unites them into society to achieve well-being and spiritual values.

The language exists in two forms: oral and writing. Passed from mouth to mouth, fixed in texts, it tirelessly overcomes centuries, connects generations, collects and preserves the spiritual essence of the people, the national picture of the world, forms the national consciousness and culture of the nation. The need for effective and effective communication stimulates broadcasters to artistic understanding of the language, to the search for more and more accurate and expressive language tools. As a result, a polished, cultural version is being created from the national language - selective literary broadcasting, which itself can already become art and aesthetic material for other types of art.
Speech is immortal, because in it the immortality of the people lives in it and with it. But in the immortality of language there is also a part of the immortality of man. Through the language, each person touches the immortality of his people.

Language function

Language is one of the unique phenomena of human life and societies. She appeared simultaneously with them and not only to their very sign, but also the most necessary condition for the formation of their essence. Language serves man and society, but this does not exhaust its role. Language is also a form of their being.
Of the many functions of language in human life and society, the main ones are the following:

1 . Communicative function, or communication function. Its essence lies in the fact that the language is used as a means of communication between people, as an information link in society. This function is vital for both society and language. For society, it is important because with the help of language people exchange thoughts and feelings, enrich themselves with the experience of previous generations, unite for protection, create material and spiritual values, take care of progress forward.

For the language, the communicative function is also extremely important, since speech, which is not communicated dies. With the death of a language, the people die, they were its creator and bearer, the living culture created by this people and language dies, and written and material culture is lost for centuries and forgotten.

A people that has lost its language of communication loses the entire spiritual and cultural world of values that has been created on the basis of its language. Such a people quickly becomes like the people whose language they took for communication, i.e. assimilated, dissolved in another nation. But, having lost everything that has been acquired over the centuries, an assimilated people will never be compared with a neighbor whose language has been adopted, because it has lost its national soil and dignity, it is less expensive, secondary. That is why it is necessary not only to verbally recognize the right of the Ukrainian language to be widely used in public life, but also for each of us to communicate everywhere in it, so that the Ukrainian language lives a full-blooded life.

Mankind has invented several means of information exchange: sound and light signals, Morse code, road signs, symbols, fonts, codes, gestures. But all of them have a limited scope and in relation to the language, they are secondary, derivative, those that have already arisen on the basis of the language. Language is a universal and unique, materially cheap means of communication.

2 . Nominative function, or the naming function. Everything known by a person (objects, persons, qualities, properties, phenomena, processes, regularities and concepts about them) receives a name and so under this linguistic name exists in the life and in the minds of the speakers. The name distinguishes the item from many others. Not only real-life objects, but also unreal, imaginary, fictional, fantastic ones receive a linguistic name. Thanks to this function, each language can be viewed as a separate native picture of the world, reflecting the national worldview and attitude. Speakers try to create names in their own language in all spheres of communication. If they do not create their own names, then they are forced to borrow them from other languages and translate, copy, or simply adopt other people's names in unchanged form. There are no languages in the world that have not borrowed names from other languages. But if there are too many borrowings and this process is intense, there is a threat to lose the originality of one's language. Therefore, one should use existing names as much as possible or create new ones from the material of one's own language, and resort to borrowings only in case of emergency.

3 . thought function. Language is not only a form of expression and transmission of thought (as we observe in communicative function), but also a means of formation, i.e. the creation of thought itself. Man thinks in linguistic forms. This process is complex, it moves away from the concrete-sensory level to the conceptual one. The concept is fixed in words and in the process of mental operations they are compared, compared, contrasted, whether they are combined or distributed. Therefore, to think means to operate with concepts in a linguistic form, a linguistic expression.

4 . cognitive function language. It lies in the fact that a person learns the world not so much through his own experience as through language, because the experience of previous generations has been accumulated in it, sum knowledge about the world. For example: by means of the language one can obtain thorough, objective knowledge about space e, the ocean or some country, never having been there. Language is rich in information, it constantly provides our brain with material for mental operations, nourishes and drives the development of intelligence.

5 . Expressive, or expressive, function of language. The unique world of intellect, feelings and emotions, human will is invisible to others. And only language provides more opportunities to reveal them to other people, to influence them with the power of their beliefs or feelings.

6 . Voluntative function is close to expressive. It lies in the fact that the language is a means of expressing the will of the interlocutors (greeting, farewell, request, apology, prompting, invitation).

7 . aesthetic function. Language captures the aesthetic tastes of its speakers. Sonority, harmony of content, form and sound, compliance with the norms of the literary language in the process of communication become a source of aesthetic pleasure for broadcasters, contribute to the development of high aesthetic taste.

In its artistic perfect form, the literary language is perceived by aesthetically educated broadcasters as an aesthetic phenomenon (for example, highly works of art A.S. Pushkin, L. Tolstoy, F. Dostoevsky, A. Blok and others).

Language is the primary element culture It underlies the development of all other arts. And the aesthetic values that they generate are determined to a large extent by the aesthetic possibilities of the language (theater, cinema, radio, television, etc.).

8 . Culturological function of language. The language is the bearer of the culture of the people-creator. Each person, mastering his native language, assimilates the culture of his people, because, together with the language, he perceives songs, fairy tales, witticisms, jokes, legends, thoughts, traditions, stories, crafts, customs, traditions of the material culture and spiritual life of the nation.

By promoting the language, we spread our culture, introduce it into the world. By translating works of art and scientific works from other languages into Russian, we enrich our culture with the heritage of other cultures, and develop our speech. The speech culture of a person is an indicator of its general culture, level of education.

9 . The identification function of the language lies in the fact that the language acts as a means of identifying speakers, i.e. a means of expressing their belonging to the same community, a certain identification: I, like them, because I have a common language with them. Identification turns out to be in a time dimension: many generations in the past are our ancestors who spoke our language. Identification turns out to be in the time dimension: Ukraine, Russia, Canada, America, Australia and other countries show their belonging to the Russian language.

The identifying function can also be called a unifying function. Belonging to a certain people, its culture is determined ethnically, i.e. origin. But it is not always the case. There are many people of non-Russian origin who became Russian in spirit, because they adopted Russian culture with the Russian language, the whole world is Russian, and our land was and is their native land.

10 . The mythological function of the language has been preserved since prehistoric times, when people believed in the word as a real action that could stop an undesirable course of action, overcome evil forces, and subordinate nature to their will. This mythological power of the word is widely reflected in Russian folklore: incantations, whispering, sorcery, casting, divination, fairy tales, traditions, legends, etc. In them, individual words and expressions are endowed with extraordinary power under certain conditions of their pronunciation. In the verbal world, the boundaries of the real and the imaginary are shifting. Now, in connection with the spread of the theory of the human biological field, positive and negative energy, extrasensory perception, the mythological function of language is gaining new impulses.

Language units are involved in the performance of language functions in different ways. So, the communicative function of the language is performed by sentences, it is called the communicative unit of the language. However, other units of the language also participate in the communicative function, but not as separate communicative units, but as units of lower orders, like construction material language structure and system. The nominative function falls on words, lexical phrases, phraseological units. Expressive, voluntary functions involve vocabulary with emotional, volitional meaning. All units of the language subsystems with varying degrees of productivity participate in the performance of the other named functions.

Federal Agency for Education

State educational institution

higher professional education

Tula State University

Department of the Russian language

Abstract on the topic

"The role of language in the development of society"

Tula 2007

1. Introduction

2. Language as a means of human communication

1. Language. Its functions. Communication

2. Speech culture. Culture of communication. Speech etiquette

3.5. Conclusion

4. 6. References

Introduction

It so happened that living in words and words, and not reality, accustomed to semantic unambiguity, people lost the ability to understand the different meanings of words, to see the degree of their correspondence to reality. This is connected with the problem of the spiritual state of society, with the speech culture of its members, the culture of their communication.

The problem that interested me is the moral character, the culture of the individual, since in solving economic, general social and cultural issues, the efforts of not only the team, but also each person are important.

The increased interest in moral issues in recent times is also caused by the awareness of a rather low culture in the field of communication.

Modern speech reflects the unstable cultural and linguistic state of society, balancing on the verge of the literary language and jargon. The question arose of preserving the literary language, of the ways of its further development in connection with the change in the contingent of speakers.

High level speech culture is an essential feature of a cultured person. To improve our speech is the task of each of us. To do this, you need to monitor your speech in order to avoid mistakes in pronunciation, in the use of word forms, in the construction of a sentence. You need to constantly enrich your vocabulary, learn to feel your interlocutor, be able to select the most suitable words and constructions for each case.

The importance of language in people's lives is enormous, and the appropriate use of all its many functions is simply necessary both for us and for its existence.

Language as a means of human communication.

Language is defined as a means of human communication. This one of the possible definitions of language is the main one, because it characterizes the language not from the point of view of its organization, structure, etc., but from the point of view of what it is intended for. There are other means of communication as well. An engineer can communicate with a colleague without knowing his native language, but they will understand each other if they use blueprints. Drawing is usually defined as the international language of engineering. The musician conveys his feelings with the help of a melody, and the listeners understand him. The artist thinks in images and expresses it with lines and colors. And all these are “languages”, so often they say “the language of the poster”, “the language of music”. But that's another meaning of the word. language .

Let's take a look at the modern four-volume Dictionary of the Russian Language. It contains 8 meanings of the word language , among them:

1. Organ in the oral cavity.

2. This human organ, involved in the formation of speech sounds and thus in the verbal reproduction of thoughts; organ of speech.

3. A system of verbal expression of thoughts, which has a certain sound and grammatical structure and serves as a means of communication between people .

4. A type of speech that has certain characteristic features; style, style.

5. A means of wordless communication.

6. Obsolete People.

The fifth meaning refers to the language of music, the language of flowers, etc.

And the sixth, obsolete, means people . As you can see, the most important ethnographic feature is taken to define the people - its language. Remember, Pushkin:

The rumor about me will spread throughout the great Russia,

And every language that is in it will call me,

And the proud grandson of the Slavs, and the Finn, and now wild

Tungus, and a Kalmyk friend of the steppes.

But all these "languages" do not replace the main thing - the verbal language of a person. And Lomonosov wrote about this at one time: “True, besides our word, it would be possible to depict thoughts through different movements of the eyes, face, hands and other parts of the body, somehow pantomimes are presented in theaters, but in this way it would be impossible to speak without light , and other human exercises, especially the work of our hands, were a great insanity for such a conversation.

Thus, language is the most important means of communication. What qualities must he possess to become just that?

First of all, everyone who speaks the language must know the language. There is, as it were, some general agreement that the table will be called the word table , and running is a word run . It is impossible to decide now how it happened, because the paths are very different. For example, here is the word satellite in our time has acquired a new meaning - "a device launched with the help of rocket devices." The date of birth of this value can be indicated absolutely exactly - October 4, 1957, when the radio announced the launch in our country of the first artificial satellite of the Earth. Such a meaning itself was already prepared by the Russian language: in the XI-XIII centuries it had the meaning of “comrade on the road” and “accompanying in life”, then - “satellite of the planets”. And from here it is not far to a new meaning - "a device accompanying the Earth." This word immediately became known in this sense and entered into the everyday life of all peoples of the world.

But often not all words are known to speakers of a given language. And then normal communication is disrupted. Most of all, this is connected with foreign words. But misunderstanding can also be associated with original Russian words known only in a certain territory, or with words that are rarely used, outdated.

But if there are a lot of similar words, it makes it difficult to read the text. Therefore, critics oppose such a heap of dialectisms. This is what the satirists laugh at.

Difficult communication and professional words, known only to people of this profession. However, professional vocabulary is a very important part of the vocabulary of the language. It contributes to a more accurate and fruitful communication of people of a certain profession, which is extremely necessary. The larger and more accurate the dictionary, the more detailed it allows you to talk about the processes, the higher the quality of the work.

The comprehensibility of the language ensures it role in organizing people. Born as a product of collective labor, the language is still called upon to unite people in labor activity, in the field of culture, etc.

The second quality on which communication depends is that the language should cover everything that surrounds a person, including his inner world. This, however, does not mean at all that the language should exactly repeat the structure of the world. We really have "words for every essence," as A. Tvardovsky said. But even that which does not have a one-word name can be successfully expressed by combinations of words.

It is much more important that the same concept in the language can have, and very often has, several names. Moreover, it is believed that the richer such rows of words - synonyms, the richer the language is recognized. This shows an important point; language reflects external world, but it is not absolutely adequate to it.

Here, for example, is the color spectrum. There are several primary colors of the spectrum. It now relies on precise physical indicators. As you know, the light of the waves various lengths excites different color sensations. It is difficult to separate exactly “by eye”, for example, red and purple, which is why we usually combine them into one color - red. And how many words are there for this color: red, scarlet, crimson, bloody, rye, red, ruby, pomegranate, red, cherry, raspberry etc.! It will not be possible to distinguish between these words according to the length of light waves, because they are filled with their own special shades of significance.

The fact that the language does not blindly copy the surrounding reality, but somehow in its own way, highlighting something more, attaching less importance to something, is one of the amazing and far from fully explored mysteries.

The two most important functions of the language that we have considered do not exhaust all its advantages and features. Some will be discussed next. Now let's think about how we can evaluate a person. Of course, there are many reasons for this: his appearance, attitude towards other people, towards work, etc. All this, of course, is true. But language also helps us to characterize a person.

They say: they meet by clothes, see off by mind. How do you know about the mind? Of course, from the speech of a person, from how and what he says. His dictionary characterizes a person, that is, how many words he knows. So, the writers I. Ilf and E. Petrov, having decided to create the image of the primitive bourgeois Ellochka Shchukina, first of all, spoke about her dictionary: “William Shakespeare's dictionary, according to researchers, is twelve thousand words. The vocabulary of a negro from the cannibalistic tribe of Mumbo Yumbo is three hundred words. Ellochka Shchukina easily and freely managed thirty ... ”The image of Ellochka the Cannibal became a symbol of an extremely primitive person and one sign contributed to this - her language.

Language. Its functions. Communication

The native language is the soul of the nation, its primary and most obvious sign. In the language and through the language, such important features and traits as national psychology, the character of the people, the way of thinking, the original uniqueness of artistic creativity, the moral state and spirituality are revealed.

Language can be defined as a system of communication carried out with the help of sounds and symbols, the meanings of which are conditional, but have a certain structure.

Language is a social phenomenon. It cannot be mastered outside of social interaction, i.e. without interacting with other people. Although the process of socialization is largely based on the imitation of gestures - nodding, smiling and frowning - language is the main means of transmitting culture. Another important feature is that it is almost impossible to unlearn how to speak a native language if its basic vocabulary, rules of speech and structure are learned at the age of eight or ten, although many other aspects of a person's experience can be completely forgotten. This indicates a high degree of adaptability of the language to human needs; without it, communication between people would be much more primitive.

When using a language, it is necessary to follow its basic grammatical rules. Language organizes the experience of people. Therefore, like the whole culture as a whole, it develops generally accepted meanings. Communication is possible only if there are meanings that are accepted, used by its participants and understood by them. Indeed, our communication with each other in everyday life is largely due to our confidence that we understand each other.

The basic functions of language are communication, cognition and influence. Language is always good, it can be bad speech or a native speaker who creates bad speech out of good language. Any language, accumulating the experience of people's life in all its fullness and diversity, is also its real consciousness. Each new generation, each representative of a particular ethnic group, mastering the language, joins through it to the collective experience, collective knowledge about the surrounding reality, generally accepted norms of behavior, assessments rejected or accepted by the people, social values. It follows from this that language cannot but influence the experience of a particular individual, his behavior, culture. Under the explicit or implicit influence of the literary language, its institutions, traditions are all spheres of human life, and its success largely depends on the language environment in which a person lives, how he mastered his native language.

The power of the impact of the word, as it turns out, does not depend directly on the power of its sound. The effectiveness and efficiency of the word are determined by expediency, which implies that the speaker takes into account the conditions and place of communication, the addressee. Speech communication skills, which provide an expedient, communicatively-motivated choice of words, are correlated, as analysis shows, with a life position, interconnected with a form of behavior.

The disunity of people, misunderstanding of each other, inevitable in the conditions of antagonism, leave their mark on their speech behavior, linguistic consciousness, deforming the personality. Moral forms of behavior, the general cultural level of the environment determine speech behavior, due to a certain set of communicative skills.

If a person speaks briefly and impressively, quietly and sincerely, dryly and businesslike, people like it, as well as even, simple, clear, weighty speech, when the speaker has distinct thoughts. A distinct thought, clothed in a clear and simple form, is not often found.

Speech has a socio-historical nature. People have always lived and live collectively, in society. Public life and the collective work of people make it necessary to constantly communicate, establish contact with each other, influence each other. This communication is done through speech. Thanks to speech, people exchange thoughts and knowledge, talk about their feelings, experiences, intentions.

Communicating with each other, people use words and use the grammatical rules of a particular language. Language is a system of verbal signs, a means by which communication is carried out between people. Speech is the process of using language to communicate with people. Language and speech are inextricably linked, they represent a unity, which is expressed in the fact that historically the language of any nation was created and developed in the process of speech communication between people. The connection between language and speech is also expressed in the fact that language as an instrument of communication exists historically as long as people speak it. As soon as people stop using this or that language in speech communication, it becomes a dead language. Such a dead language has become, for example, Latin.

Cognition of the laws of the surrounding world, the mental development of a person is accomplished through the assimilation of knowledge developed by mankind in the process of socio-historical development and fixed with the help of language, with the help of written speech. Language in this sense is a means of consolidating and transmitting from generation to generation the achievements of human culture, science and art. Each person in the learning process assimilates the knowledge acquired by all mankind and accumulated historically.

Speech culture is a relatively young area of the science of language. As an independent section of this science, it took shape under the influence of the fundamental social changes that took place in our country. The involvement of the broad masses in active social activities required increased attention to raising the level of their speech culture.

In the section "Speech culture" speech is studied. The culture of speech deals with the qualitative assessment of statements. It, as a section of linguistics, considers the following questions: How does a person use speech for the purpose of communication? What is his speech - right or wrong? How to improve speech?

In modern linguistics, two levels of human speech culture are distinguished - the lower and the higher. For the lower level, for the first stage of mastering the literary language, it is enough to have correct speech, adherence to the norms of the Russian literary language: lexical, orthoepic, grammatical, derivational, morphological, syntactic.

If a person does not make mistakes in pronunciation, in the use of word forms, in their formation, in the construction of a sentence, we call his speech correct. However, this is not enough. Speech can be correct, but bad, that is, not consistent with the goals and conditions of communication. The concept of good speech includes at least three features: richness, accuracy and expressiveness. Indicators of rich speech are a large volume of active vocabulary, a variety of morphological forms and syntactic constructions used. The accuracy of speech is the choice of such language means that best express the content of the statement, reveal its topic and main idea. Expressiveness is created through the selection of language means that are most appropriate for the conditions and tasks of communication.

If a person has a correct and good speech, he reaches the highest level of speech culture. This means that he not only does not make mistakes, but also knows how to build statements in the best way in accordance with the purpose of communication, select the most suitable words and constructions in each case, taking into account who and under what circumstances he is addressing.

Our society has already felt the need for a culture of behavior and communication. Very often there are announcements that in lyceums, colleges, gymnasiums, schools open electives with the names "Etiquette", "Business Etiquette", "Diplomatic Etiquette", "Etiquette business communication" etc. This is connected with the need for people to learn how to behave in a given situation, how to correctly establish and maintain speech, and through it business, friendly, etc. contact.

The broad concept of culture necessarily includes what is called the culture of communication and speech behavior. To own it, it is important to understand the essence of speech etiquette.

In communication, people convey this or that information, certain meanings to each other, communicate something, encourage something, ask about something, perform certain speech actions. However, before proceeding to the exchange of logical and meaningful information, it is necessary to enter into speech contact, and this is done according to certain rules. We hardly notice them, because they are familiar. It is just the violation of the unwritten rules that becomes noticeable: the seller addressed the buyer with “you”, the acquaintance did not say hello at the meeting, they did not thank someone for the service, they did not apologize for the misconduct. As a rule, such non-fulfillment of the norms of speech behavior turns into resentment or conflict in the team. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the rules for entering into verbal contact, maintaining such contact - after all, business relations are impossible without this. It is clear that awareness of the norms of communication and speech behavior is useful to everyone, and especially to people of those professions that are associated with speech. These are teachers, doctors, lawyers, service workers and businessmen, and just parents.

The rules of speech behavior are regulated by speech etiquette, which has developed in the language and speech by a system of set expressions used in situations of establishing and maintaining contact. These are situations of address, greetings, farewell, apologies, gratitude, congratulations, wishes, sympathy and condolences, approval and compliments, invitations, suggestions, requests for advice, etc. Speech etiquette covers everything that expresses a benevolent attitude towards the interlocutor, which can to create the benefit of a pleasant climate of communication. A rich set of language tools makes it possible to choose appropriate for the speech situation and favorable for the addressee ( you or you) form of communication, to establish a friendly, relaxed or, on the contrary, the official tone of the conversation.

It is important to emphasize that speech etiquette conveys social information about the speaker and his addressee, about whether they know each other or not, about the relationship of equality / inequality by age, official position, about their personal relationships (if they are familiar), about how setting (formal or informal) communication takes place, etc.

Thus, the choice of the most appropriate expression of speech etiquette constitutes the rules for entering into communication. It is clear that any society at any moment of its existence is heterogeneous, many-sided, and that for each layer and layer there is both its own set of etiquette means and neutral expressions common to all. And there is an awareness that in contacts with a different environment, it is necessary to choose either stylistically neutral or means of communication characteristic of this environment. Using the expressions of speech etiquette, we perform relatively simple speech actions - we address, greet, thank ... There are a huge number of ways to do this in the language. The thing is that we choose each expression taking into account who - where - when - why - why we say. So it turns out that complex linguistic social information is embedded just in speech etiquette to the greatest extent.

There are several essential features of speech etiquette that explain its social severity.

The first sign is associated with the unwritten requirement of society for the use of signs of etiquette. If you want to be "your own" in this group, perform the appropriate rituals of behavior and communication.

The second sign is related to the fact that the performance of signs of etiquette is perceived by the addressee as social “stroking”. Psychologists, teachers know how important it is to approve, stroke a child, and even an adult, in time. Linguists thought about this and found that the language responded to such a need and created a system of verbal “strokes”.

The third important feature of speech etiquette is that the pronunciation of an etiquette expression is a speech action, or a speech act, that is, the performance of a specific task with the help of speech. It is known that for the implementation of many actions, states, speech is not needed. You sew, or cut, or saw, or walk - and for the "production" of this you do not need to say anything. But there are some actions that can be performed only with the help of one tool - language, speech. Studies have revealed that there are up to a thousand names of speech actions recorded in dictionaries, while there are a great many ways of direct expression.

The fourth important feature of speech etiquette can be considered its connection with the category of politeness. Politeness is a moral quality that characterizes a person for whom showing respect for people has become a familiar way of communicating with others, a daily norm of behavior. On the other hand, it is an ethical category abstracted from specific people, which is also reflected in the language, which, of course, should be studied by linguistics. Polite people in different situations and in relation to different partners behave correctly, courteously, gallantly. But inept and inappropriate politeness is perceived as mannerism, ceremony. At the same time, one must understand that there is politeness-sincerity, coming from a pure heart, and there is politeness-mask, hiding other relationships behind external manifestations.

The manifestations of rudeness are manifold. This is arrogance, and arrogance, and arrogance, this is an insult, an offense. It is impolite to fail to comply with the rules of speech etiquette (they pushed and did not apologize), the wrong choice of expression in this situation and for this partner, hurting the partner with the help of words that have a negative connotation. A correct, and under an hour emphatically polite answer, as a rule, puts a rude person in his place. Speech etiquette serves as an effective means of removing speech aggression.

The fifth feature is related to the fact that speech etiquette is an important element of the culture of the people, a product of human cultural activity and an instrument of such activity. Speech etiquette, as can be seen from the foregoing, is an integral part of the culture of human behavior and communication. Being an element of national culture, speech etiquette is distinguished by bright national specifics.

Conclusion

Such is the miraculous power of the word. It is especially important and valid in difficult communication situations. The word can be the strongest weapon not only in the hands of self-serving demagogues. It can be an even more powerful weapon in the hands of wrestlers. And although they use it, they are far from always aware of the power of the word - both destructive and constructive.

The possibilities of the language are endless. So, mutual language maintains social cohesion. In addition, between people who speak the same language, mutual understanding and sympathy almost automatically arise. The language reflects the general knowledge of people about the traditions that have developed in society and current events. The leaders of developing countries where tribal dialects exist are striving to ensure that a single national language is adopted, so that it spreads among groups that do not speak it, understanding the importance of this factor for uniting the whole nation and combating tribal disunity.

Although language is a powerful unifying force, at the same time it is capable of dividing people. The group using this language considers everyone who speaks it as their own, and people who speak other languages or dialects as strangers.

Know means of expression language, to be able to use its stylistic and semantic riches in all their structural diversity - every native speaker should strive for this.

The protection and protection of natural resources and the health of the people are now recognized as an important national matter. Protected and restored monuments of material culture - part of the spiritual historical heritage. Our language needs the same careful approach. The Russian literary language must be protected from clogging with vulgarisms and jargon, from stylistic “decrease” and stylistic “averaging”. It must be protected from unnecessary borrowings in foreign languages, mistakes and inaccuracies, in a word, from everything that leads to its impoverishment, impoverishment or death of thought.

The state of the science of language, the trends in the development of society made it necessary for the emergence of interdisciplinary sciences, one of which was ...

Linguistics

The conditionality of the structure, emergence, development and function of language, the impact of society on language and language on society.
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Origin and development of the Russian language

Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries played an important role in the development and formation of the Russian literary language. (A. S. Griboyedov, M. Yu. Lermontov, N. V. Gogol, I. S...
Building the world's first socialist society, developing Soviet science and technology...

Introduction

I was attracted to the title of the topic of my essay "Language: essence, origin, functions, role and place in the life of society", the concept of "language". It is interesting to know what is hidden behind this "word". Language, in my understanding, is a mystery to be unraveled.

The greatest mystery of language lies in its naturalness. It is as familiar and imperceptible as breathing. We can talk about everything. But we do not always think about how air vibrations perceived by the ear can tell us about colors and smells. sizes and shapes known through sight and touch. The world of thought, embodied in "fragile sound", flourishes and asserts itself along with the world of nature.

Language is one of the reasons why human life is interesting and moves forward.

In order to deal with the topic of my essay, I must, relying on the points of view of great thinkers, look into the depths of the well of history, answer the question: "When did human language arise?" I will also try to answer other questions posed by me, arising from the title of this work: "What is the essence of language?"; "What functions does the language perform?"; "What is the language in the life of society?"

These questions are arranged in such a logical chain that will help me deal with the problem posed.

I believe that on this moment time, the topic has not lost its relevance. Because, from ancient thinkers to modern thinkers, the problem of "language" is nothing more than an intertwining of possible misconceptions with possibly correct ideas.

The relevance of the topic stems from its complexity.

Four questions have been put before me, answering which I begin to consider this topic "Language: essence, origin, functions, role and place in the life of society".

Chapter 1

1.1 How did human language originate?

One of the questions is posed: "How did human language arise?" This question is not resolved and it looks like it will take a very long time to answer it. So what is this chapter about? In it, I consider the search for an answer to the question of the origin of human language. Any problem can be correctly posed when it has already been solved. From here you can trace the course of its solution, but if there are no answers, then the unidirectional logic of history disappears. Ancient Greek thinkers believed that the stable world of ideas is the only reality worthy of study, because it contains the meaning of being. This happened when they were aware of nature, language and mind. After all, any person is a person, as long as he embodies the nature of man in general. And an act is just only because it expresses justice as such. But in the world around us there are only specific people and specific actions, and there is neither a person in general, nor justice in itself. We can talk about them without being able to show them. They exist only through language. Language has measured nature with man, and man with himself. Thanks to this, the level of human culture "grew". And where, after all, is that moment in time in the past when the language itself arose? Let's consider several points of view.

1.2 A. Verzhbovsky's theory of the origin of man ("Theory of onomatopoeia")

A. Verzhbovsky claims that "everything that ever existed and existing languages Homo sapiens have a consanguineous common Cro-Magnon origin (regardless of one or more places of Humanization of the Primate, since the Tribal Organization dates back to one single Cave from where it (like the "Bee Families" and organized living beings gaining experience in the struggle for survival) was scattered to every corner of the earth."

In his opinion, A. Verzhbovsky, the first words were root bases - "two-consonant first signals of onomatopoeic origin." Their emergence occurred among members of the humanizing community. The words were then divided into two groups.

The first of the groups of words was intended to name the "terrifying forces of nature." For example: 1) GaN - RaN "for naming Thunder at Sunset/Sunrise"; 2) Man - "for the Flying Dragon"; 3) YesN - "to express the joy of the younger members of the Humanizing Community that the beast is killed, brought and thrown to be devoured by children."

The second group is actually human. These are the titles of the first cave ancestors "according to production functions". For example: 1) aM is the title of the progenitors called by the "Watchdog Female to feed the suckling youngest crybabies"; 2) "as - the smallest; 3) Ai - av - "Knee of Grandchildren Crybabies on the South Side of the Whole Cave, who were trained by females";

) Al - Ar - the title of the guys who "already drove the animals with screams into the trapping pits" in order to kill them with stones; 5) Ag - "Older Children"; 6) Ab- "First-knee men", who "made up a squad of hunters armed with the heaviest stones.

A. Verzhbovsky described the first few words of the human language. After all, it is no less greatest achievement than deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. But such an event went unnoticed, because "granddaughter crybabies" are not science, but "a fairy tale for adults." The results of such a study cannot be verified. Why did the inhabitants of the cave have to give the name "Flying Dragon", and not "Saber-toothed tiger"? This "fairy tale" was published as scientific work, and this cannot be overlooked. Science cannot but pay attention to such an event and go its own way. Of course, this does not happen. But the appearance of such works indicates that this field of knowledge has not yet taken shape in science.

Consider another version of the origin of the language.

1.3 Divine theory about language ("Old Testament version")

It says the following version of the origin of the language: 1) "The Lord God formed from the earth the animals of the field and all the birds of the air, and brought (them) to man to see how he would call them, and to know how he would call every living soul, so it was her name, and the man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to all the beasts of the field…” .

) "In the whole earth there was one language and one dialect ... And they said: let us build a name for ourselves, before we are scattered over the face of the earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men were building. And the Lord said: behold, one people, and they all have one language: and this is what they began to do, and they will not be left behind from what they planned to do. Let us go down and confuse their language there, so that one does not understand the speech of the other. And the Lord scattered them over all the earth, and they They stopped building the city and the “tower.” Therefore, the name Babylon was given to it, for there the Lord confounded the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them over all the earth.”

If you try to understand these texts, they can be understood very broadly. Back in the 3rd century, Ephraim the Sirin said that Adam invented a thousand names in one hour, which became the basis of the original Hebrew language. For more than a thousand years, no one doubts that the Hebrew language is the first language of mankind.

The first word that was uttered by Adam, according to Dante, is the Hebrew word "EL" - God.

It follows from the "divine theory" that Adam was created speaking the Hebrew language, and Eve, their children, their children's children, etc., learned this language from him.

During the construction of the Tower of Babel, the Lord mixed up the language of Adam. According to E. Sirin, God breathed the ability to create a language into a person, and its further change is its own imperfect creation.

What is the theory of "I"?

.4 What theory do I adhere to?

It seems to me that the most reliable version of the origin of man is the theory of onomatopoeia, which A. Verzhbovsky adheres to. You can see that people sigh, shout, react differently to different objects. Now we ask ourselves the question: why are these reactions clear to everyone? Because the same sounds refer to the same things. But how could this be achieved if people still cannot agree: the language has not yet appeared. It turns out that sounding objects or animals are depicted by voice, imitating them.

If someone says "woof-woof!" - everyone will understand that a dog is meant, and if he says "coo-coo!", no one will think that it is a tiger. That's where the first words come from!

At first, people cuckooed, yapped, crowed, growled. And when we saved up words, then the life of our ancestor became easier.

Another argument in favor of the theory of onomatopoeia: if people learn language by imitating the sounds of other people, then who could the first people imitate? Only the sounds of nature. However, this overlooks a tiny detail: it is not clear what "first people" means. These, apparently, are some people who have just appeared, jumping out, for example, from a shark (as Anaximander believed). This question is easier to answer for an anthropologist.

Now let's try to consider and try to answer the following question, which I put before myself in the introduction: "What is the essence of language?"

Chapter 2 The Essence of Language

2.1 Understanding "language"

Let us put before ourselves the question in order to understand the "essence of language": "What is "language"?"

In my work, I will consider two points of view on the concept of the term "language": linguistic, for example, L. L. Verzhbovsky and philosophical - E. Cassirer.

From a linguistic point of view, the word "language" means a system of signs - that which constitutes the subject of linguistics, and to be more precise, language is a system of interrelated categories that allowed a person to create and maintain a sign system of language. At the lexical level, each language encodes some areas of experience in greater detail than others. There is an opinion that if in a certain language there is only one word as the meaning of a phenomenon, then this word easily becomes a classification principle for speakers given language. Two additional examples given by L. L. Verzhbovsky:

The Hopi people designate with the same word all flying objects, except birds (for example: planes, insects, pilots), while in most languages there are separate concepts for all these things.

On the other hand, the Eskimos use a number of different words for snow: falling snow, melted snow, dry snow - while they usually use one word "snow".

The linguist is trying to reconstruct exactly the system of signs (which, for example, L. L. Verzhbovsky did).

The linguistic point of view is not enough to answer the question: "What is "language"?" Let's consider philosophical views with the help of one of the thinkers E. Cassirer.

In his understanding, "language" is a not fully understood specific feature of a person, which, on the one hand, reflects, on the other hand, fixes a certain view of the world. Language is the ability to express one's thoughts reflected in consciousness, through the nature of meanings. The nature of meaning was considered, in his opinion, in connection with all kinds of human activities. She acted as a problem of social behavior and communication of people. Cassirer held the idea that in human activity things acquire a symbolic function. The terms of ordinary and scientific language, phenomena of art, concepts of morality, philosophical categories and others concentrate in themselves the thoughts and feelings common to a given culture. With the help of symbols, a person crosses his individual boundaries and participates in the collective mental process (public consciousness, public opinion, the spirit of the era, etc.). The philosophy of symbolic forms in the interpretation of E. Cassirer covered not only the actual cognitive, but also other types of sign activity: artistic, mythical, religious, ritual and others, where a person gives certain human meaning to certain natural or artificial objects. Psychological phenomena were also included in the problem of meaning. human life and reactions of people in the process of communication. With all the breadth of his approach, Cassirer, in accordance with his idealistic philosophical positions, refers "language" exclusively to the internal sphere. human consciousness.

I have considered two points of view on the concept of "language" from different fields of science: linguistics and philosophy. Obviously, only philosophy is interested in finding a connection between human consciousness and language. With the help of symbols, a person is able to express his thoughts. But if one adheres to a philosophical point of view, is a linguistic one necessary?

Remaining on the neutral side between the versions of the concept of "language" that I have considered, it seems to me that without the literacy of the presentation of one's thoughts and their exact presentation, the "culture" of a person degrades.

2.2 Relationship between "language" and "speech"

What is the relationship between "language" and "speech"? Are "language" and "speech" the same thing? To answer this question, let's compare two points of view on these categories: linguistic and philosophical.

Linguistics has always used the term "language" , and only from the beginning of the 20th century. the concept of "speech" appears. Language and speech together form a single phenomenon, and at the same time there are fundamental differences between them.

Let us ask ourselves the question: what is "speech"?

"Speech" - this is a specific speaking that takes place in sound or written form, this is everything that is said and written: a conversation between acquaintances, a speech at a rally, a speech by a lawyer, a scientific essay, a poem, a story, a report, etc.

But speech is impossible without language. For example, foreign speech will be perceived as an incomprehensible continuous hum, in which it is difficult to distinguish words, sentences if we do not know the language. Speech is built according to the laws of the language, is produced by the language, represents its embodiment, implementation. As L. L. Verzhbovsky wrote.

"Language is both a tool and a product of speech." In other words, language creates speech and at the same time creates itself in speech.

We read the text, we hear the speech. By observing and analyzing spoken and written speech, we comprehend the structure of language as a "mechanism" that generates speech. For example, in order to "discover" such a part of speech as a noun, linguists had to analyze a huge amount of speech material. And then it turned out that there are words that have the meaning of objectivity and have certain grammatical features, that is, they behave in speech in the same way.

But language, unlike speech, is not given to us in direct perception. “You can master the language and you can think about the language,” wrote the famous linguist A.A. Reformatsky, “but you can’t see or touch the language. You can’t even hear it in the direct meaning of this word” (4, p. 65).

Indeed, one can hear or pronounce a word, a sentence, a whole text, but it is impossible to "touch" a noun or a verb. These are abstract concepts that are extracted from speech, much like iron from ore.

So, speech is material, it is perceived by the senses. And what do thinkers think about the relationship between "language" and "speech"?

From the point of view of philosophy, relying on the material of M.S. Kozlova, “language” is a not fully understood specific feature of a person, which, on the one hand, reflects, on the other hand, fixes a certain view of the world. Speech is the realization of language, the process of speaking and the result of this process.

Speech is material, it is perceived by the senses - hearing, sight and even touch, for example, texts for the blind. Language is a system of categories derived from speech that govern speech, but are inaccessible to our senses or sensations. Language is comprehended by the mind, the scientific analysis of speech.

There are other distinctive features of language and speech. Unlike language, speech is individual and concrete.

For example, the lines: "My uncle is the most honest rules…", - belong to A.S. Pushkin.

Language, unlike speech, is collective, fundamentally impersonal, it belongs to everyone (to paraphrase A. Pushkin): an academician, a hero, a navigator, and a carpenter.

One and the same Russian language gives rise to literary masterpieces and clerical speech, poetry and prose, travel notes and reports, judicial and scientific speech.

Speech is not only concrete and individual, but also infinite.

For example: even the largest libraries cannot contain everything written - books, magazines, newspapers, archives, manuscripts, diaries. And if we include sounding speech here, then the ocean, the universe of speech, will be truly boundless, inexhaustible.

Speech is mobile, dynamic, language is stable. It is the stability of the language that ensures its continuity from generation to

generation. Language changes, develops, but much more slowly than speech. And this is the guarantee of its stability, safety through the ages.

Changes in language are laid down and begin in speech. Having individual character, speech allows improvisation, deviations from language norms. At first, speech innovations cause surprise, even protests, but then some of them, spreading more and more, become the property of the entire language community, pass into the language.

Comparing the two points of view, we conclude that language is a system of signs and ways of connecting them, which serves as an instrument for expressing thoughts, feelings and will of people and is the most important means of human communication. In addition, language is also a means of cognition, allowing people to accumulate knowledge, passing it on from person to person and from each generation of people to the next generations.

2.3 Thought-images

Can "language" be "language" without thought-images?

We need to compare several views on the topic of this problem in order to answer the question posed.

Leontiev A.A. believes that language does not often mislead us. He serves us faithfully. Moreover, it is the use of language that determines the theoretical thinking of a person. And this fully applies not only to an adult, but also to a child whose mental abilities are just being formed.

Language turns out to be a faithful assistant to a person in the case that was only mentioned above - when teaching arithmetic to first-graders. If you teach a child in a new way (teach him to think), then the verbal formulation of the problem comes first. This method of teaching is based on a certain psychological theory - "the theory of mental actions", developed by associate professor of Moscow University P. Ya. Galperin. According to the "theory of mental actions", human thought (mental action) is always born as an external action - with material objects. To teach a child to count, he must first learn to operate with real objects. Then the skill worked out in this way, as it were, collapses, "growing" into the consciousness of a person. In other words, it goes from external to internal. .

And now it turns out that the first step of "clotting" and "growing" is the translation of the action into a speech form. In order to learn to count instantly in the mind, the child must describe in words his initial material action, i.e. shifting pencils from left to right or throwing bones on the abacus. The child should have images-thoughts.

Language is used by our thinking, and above all, in those cases when we encounter the use of inner speech.

Inner speech is speech that "serves" only thinking and does not serve, like other types of speech, the goals of communication. A classic example of inner speech can be found in any classroom in any school at the moment when the teacher opens the magazine to start the survey. .

In the reflections of philosophers, from the work of M.S. Kozlova, for a long time now the thought of the closest connection between human thinking and "language" has been either muffled or more clearly heard. Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, D.S. Mill... In the philosophy of modern times, this idea is perhaps more convincingly defended by Hobbes than many others: to think means to use words. "Reason is nothing but taking into account the consequences of agreed common names" Logicians noted the linguistic nature of thinking: "Language, obviously (and all thinkers agree with this), is one of the main tools of thought." The unity of language and thinking was also understood by the leading representatives of linguistics.

Marxism accepted, deepened and developed the idea of the connection between thinking and language. "At the very beginning, the "spirit" is cursed - to be "burdened" with matter, which appears here in the form of moving layers of air, sounds - in a word, in the form of language ... language is practical, existing for other people and only thereby existing also for myself, actual consciousness." The materialistic theory of society created by Marx provided the first scientific basis for the study of the connection between human thinking and language as a social tool of thought, the history of language as an embodied history of thinking, etc.

Based on two views of different scientists, it follows that language and thinking are closely related. Language is used by our thinking when we encounter the use of inner speech.

.4 Ideal language

While "language" was developing, did thinkers try to create an "ideal language"? Russell, Wittgenstein and their followers dreamed of a symbolism in which all signs are unambiguous, and their relations are regulated by "logical grammar", "logical syntax". It was assumed that the ideal language overcomes such inconvenient scientific analysis properties of natural language, such as complexity, ambiguity, psychological associations, fuzziness of the logical form. In a universal formalized language, according to the authors of this idea, the internal structure of thought should be crystallized. The concept of a logically perfect language was based on the distinction between essential, necessary and random, external features of linguistic symbolism. It was meant that the revelation of the internal logical structure of linguistic thinking is achieved in the course of analysis, which reveals the hidden logical nature of signs. A perfect language was conceived as an ideal or limit of formalized logical analysis, as a fully analyzed language. It seemed to Russell that in the case of bringing the analysis to its logical conclusion, we should get an "ideal" language containing only simple signs, the meanings of which are directly familiar to us (real "things", properties, relations and logical forms). Such language, it seemed to Russell, "straight up to reality." The idea of such a language was picked up by Wittgenstein.

When presenting the concept of an "ideal" or "logically perfect language, the views of Russell and Witenstein often do not differentiate. Meanwhile, there is a certain difference.

On a number of issues, the student disagrees with the teacher. This problem formed the main subject of Wittgenstein's later reflections. What were Wittgenstein's objections to Russell? Wittgenstein strongly disagrees with Russell's view that sentences are names of complexes, believing that it leads to the positing of "logical objects" as the meanings of logical sentences.

In an ideal language, it was not difficult to learn the general principles for constructing a logical system. The development of a formalized logical analysis was accompanied by a refinement of various types of relations between signs and the signified. Influenced by the ideas of formalization, Russell and Wittgenstein set out to develop a unified theory of the essential, necessary properties of linguistic symbolism, scientific knowledge. The doctrine of ideal language was the idea of a universal logical structure of science. It was, first of all, the logical absolutization of one of the specific logical languages.

The problem of the ideal language has not yet been solved, but attempts to solve it have already been made. The problem persists until it is resolved.

Chapter 3

3.1 Man and "language"

Man is a temporary carrier of the universal human mind, the socio-historical experience of mankind. He received it from his ancestors and will pass it on to his descendants with the help of "language". And if this experience does not pass, so to speak, through his brain, he (experience) will cease to exist altogether. Human history will end. Leontiev A.A. gives an example that if on our planet, as a result of some kind of cosmic catastrophe, the entire adult population died. Only small children survived. In such a case, human culture would perish completely.

The experience of the ancestors, assimilated by each individual

man, is deposited in his brain in the form of a so-called "pre-program", and it, being embedded in the human brain by humanity, allows him to be the owner of the most "smart machine", which has an immeasurably smaller amount of preprogramming.

According to Marx, "Language is an element of thinking itself - and also belongs - in a certain sense - to the number of spiritual abilities of man."

Language helps mankind to transfer the accumulated experience.

Therefore "language" has functions.

And what are the functions of the language can be?

3.2 Reproductive function of "language"

What is this function? From the point of view of Leontiev A.A. and Kozlova M.S., each person, with the help of language, is able to reproduce what he heard or saw.

In fact, any person sitting in front of the dashboard - whether in the cab of a truck, in the command compartment of an airliner or in the distribution room of a power substation - perceives from the instruments the information that he sees, tries to reproduce it and acts, guided by this information. But a person cannot reproduce this information if he has no thinking. So language is a tool of thinking? And if so, then this is another function of the language.

3.3 Language is an instrument of thought

The most important function of language is its ability to be an instrument of thought. The person is capable of thinking. On the example of Leontiev A.A., in which he says that in order to teach a person to count, he must first learn how to handle real objects. Then the skill worked out in this way, as it were, collapses, "growing" into the consciousness of a person. In other words, it becomes internal from external.

And now it turns out that the first step of "clotting" and "growing" is the translation of the action into a speech form. In order to learn how to count instantly in the mind, a person must describe in words his initial material action, i.e., shifting objects from left to right or vice versa, throwing bones on the accounts.

This is where a very important function of language comes into play - its ability to serve as an instrument of thinking. Of course, this ability is manifested in every person. Language is used by our thinking in this function literally at every turn. And above all, in those cases when we encounter the use of inner speech. What is inner speech?

3.4 Inner speech as a function

Inner speech is speech that "serves" only thinking and does not serve, like other types of speech, the goals of communication, it is one of the functions of "language".

Are not the images that arise in the process of visual representations and the images that are born from inner speech one and the same thing?

No, not only not the same thing, but diametrically opposed things. Leontiev A.A. clearly contrasts these two types of images. Some of them (images-representations) from the very beginning exist in thinking (or rather, in representation), as something integral, undivided. Others (images-thoughts) arise after we consciously single out, of course, with the help of speech, the necessary features of a given subject. For example: a child who does not yet know geometry may have an idea about a triangle; when he hears this word, his inner speech helps him to imagine the corresponding image in his mind. But such an image is not accompanied by knowledge of the properties of the triangle, but arises as a random impression from the first triangle that comes across. It is a completely different matter when such an image is born in the mind after a thorough study of the properties of the same triangle. And the system of verbally designated knowledge about the subject is gradually replaced in the mind by the image-thought, which, in fact, is used in the process of thinking.

3.5 The function of human experience

The function of assimilation of universal human experience, what is it?

According to Leontiev A.A., language, with the help of the brain, can give, for example, some elements of its activity to a machine for a while, but first it must necessarily take shape in order to be able to ask questions. And this is impossible if he does not will pass the way knowledge of the truths accumulated by mankind.

According to Kozlova M.S., a person may not burden his brain with detailed calculations, but he cannot "forget", cannot "give", for example, to the machine the basic principles of thinking, the main achievements of knowledge, just as he cannot "forget" the rules logical thinking. Then he just won't be human. Of course, it cannot be said that all those who do not know arithmetic are not people, but a society in which the rules of arithmetic are forgotten is not a human society.

We touched upon a very complex problem in general. What is the minimum knowledge that any person in our world of auxiliary means of thinking should have? Recently, the problems of education have been widely discussed on the pages of newspapers and magazines. And often there is indignation at the fact that we force schoolchildren and students to memorize, say, formulas that can be found in any mathematical reference book.

There is some truth in these ailments. Of course, it's a pity when a student's precious time is wasted on notorious cramming. But where is the line between unnecessary and necessary? Well, we removed from the program both Newton's binomial, and the formula for the volume of a truncated cone, and structural formula sucrose, and, finally, Einstein's formula for the dependence of mass and energy. Made learning much easier. And at the same time they would have "achieved" ... a complete stupefaction of the mind of a schoolboy. Of course, if in the future he will be a doctor, a linguist, even a chemist, and in his life there will suddenly be a need to find out what E \u003d ms is 2, then he will simply take the book off his shelf (or send a request to the information center if this happens in a hundred years). And not much to lose. However, creative activity in the field of physics, astronomy and many other sciences will be closed to him for a long time, if not forever, because creative, scientific work always involves the automation of some knowledge, their subconscious, intuitive rather than conscious accounting. A person cannot advance science if he has to look into a reference book for every reference. He cannot move it forward even if he has to carry all the knowledge with him, in his head: then he will know "everything", but he will be able to know very little.

3.6 Self-regulation as a function of "language"

So a person cannot and should not know "everything"?

Therefore, there must always be a balance, i.e., some knowledge must be acquired by a person "in the old fashioned way" - with the help of lectures, textbooks, books and deposited in his brain as a kind of bargaining chip. True, one can try to mechanize the very process of imparting knowledge, using not textbooks, but "teaching machines". So far, such attempts remain at the level of playing pedagogy. And ultimately, not by "programming" learning, but only by managing the assimilation process, one can ensure the required result.

In the same way, it is not possible to "take away" from a person the function of self-regulation inherent in language. The fact is that it ensures the existence of human consciousness. A person, says L. S. Vygotsky, becomes for himself what he is in himself, through what he presents for others; Simply put, only the use of language - first to the function of regulating other people's actions, and then in the function of regulating one's own actions - forms the consciousness of a person.

3.7 Function - tools for learning "language"

human language onomatopoeia speech

This function considered: academician I. Artobolevsky and doctor of technical sciences A. Kobrinsky. They expressed their thoughts in a paradoxical but very interesting way. They write that by "natural full-fledged living being" we mean, in particular, such a creature that continuously grows and develops, which, at the age of one, cries for unknown reasons and soils diapers; who at the age of 3 to 5 asks sometimes wise, sometimes meaningless questions, who at the age of 15 gets twos and fives in school, begins to be interested in poetry and sometimes washes his neck without special reminders; who, at the age of 20, works at a machine tool, passes exams, breastfeeds a child; who, at the age of 30, drives tractors and designs satellites: who, throughout his life, is necessarily connected by thousands and thousands of ties, with thousands and thousands of other full-fledged living beings; which dies at the end of life, because the process of dying is still one of the inevitable life processes.

We agree to recognize as alive and full-fledged such an artificial being, which, being included in a society of similar natural full-fledged living beings (based on the above formulation), throughout life from birth to death, will be able to exist and act in accordance with the laws of this society, on equal rights with all its members, working, moving, thinking and resting in the same way as on average others work, move, think and rest ... "

It is clear from what has been said above that the function of language as a tool links the individual personal mind with the "collective" mind, the public mind. It is this that forms, first of all, the specificity of the language, which allows us to call it a social phenomenon, ensures the process of formation of social consciousness, socio-historical experience at the expense of "individual" consciousness, "individual" activity.

Chapter 4. "Language" and Society

4.1 The place of "language" in the life of society

Language, being a specifically social phenomenon, serves the whole of society as a whole, and not just one class as part of a class society. "Language serves society as a means of communication between people, as a means of exchanging thoughts in society, as a means of enabling people to understand each other and to establish joint work in all spheres of human activity, both in the field of production and in the field of economic relations, both in politics, as well as in the field of culture, both in public life and in everyday life. (Mechkovskaya N.B.) .

If the language were a class language, how could we understand, without any translation, the language representative of other classes? Only N. Ya. Marr could come to the conclusion that the noble class of the Russian people understood the language of the Georgian nobles more than the language of the Russian peasants. "Language serves as a means of communication between people, serving all classes of society and even all social formations, being the product of a number of epochs during which it takes shape, enriches, develops, polishes. Create a language not by one class, but by the efforts of all classes, the efforts of hundreds of generations, for the satisfaction of society as a whole, otherwise it could not be a means of communication. Consequently, as a means of communication of the whole society, language cannot (without losing the character of language) be class. For without a common language for the whole society, communication between its members is impossible, the exchange of thoughts .

And the exchange of thoughts is a constant and vital necessity, since without it it is impossible to organize joint actions of people in the struggle against the forces of nature, in the struggle for the production of the necessary material goods, it is impossible to achieve success in the production activity of society, which means that the very existence of social production is impossible.

If the language were class-based and each class had its own, special language, unknown and misunderstood by other classes, then how would we, the people of a socialist society, understand, for example, our great Russian writers, counted on the traditions of the old noble (class) culture, noblemen by origin, A.S. Pushkin, I. S. Turgenev, L. II. Tolstoy and others?

Of course, the division of people into classes was also reflected in the language, but it did not, however, make it a class language. The language remains common to the people, uniform for the whole society, no matter what classes the people are divided into. It does not cease to be nationwide, despite the fact that certain social groups are not indifferent to the language. They use the language in class interests, impose on it their own special vocabulary, their own specific words and expressions, and try to isolate themselves in their language from other social groups.

No wonder the Russian nobility strove to use French to communicate in a narrow circle in order to hide their thoughts from people of the "lower classes". The one who spoke French, was considered a man of his circle, and who could not speak French, or use individual words, he was a non-secular person. However, those individual words and expressions that were used at the top of the noble society and the bourgeoisie cannot be considered a language. They are only an offshoot of the language, jargon or class dialect.

It is impossible, firstly, because these dialects and jargons do not have their own grammatical structure, and the main vocabulary - they borrow them from the national language. It is impossible, secondly, because dialects and jargons have a narrow sphere of circulation among members of the top of this or that class and are completely unsuitable as a means of communication between people for society as a whole. Consequently, what is not essential for the whole society as a whole, but matters only for the upper strata of society or for a narrow group of people, which has no social significance, cannot be considered elements of the national language.

From what has been said above, it follows that language occupies one of the most important steps in the life of society.

4.2 Language and its role in society

Now let's find out what role language plays in the life of society, based on the views of Mechkovskaya N.B. and Leontiev A.A.

"Language is the most important means of human communication," - this is how V. I. Lenin defines language, "... language, being an instrument of communication, is at the same time an instrument of the struggle and development of society," says I. V. Stalin.

Marx and Engels several decades ago, in their definition of language and consciousness, pointed to their connection, inseparability: “On the “spirit”, from the very beginning, the curse of “burdening” it with matter, which appears here in the form of moving layers of air, sounds, - in a word, in kind of language. Language is as ancient as consciousness; Language is just a practical consciousness, existing also for other people, and only thereby also existing for me, a real consciousness, and, like consciousness, language arises only from a need, from an urgent need to communicate with other people.

This definition of language points to the inseparable connection and unity of language and thinking, to the essence and nature of language, to the causes of the emergence of language and thinking, to the subjective and objective in language.

The first thought that originated in a person took shape, putting on a linguistic shell. It is impossible to think without language, and one can speak only when the process of thinking takes place. Language and thought are inextricably linked, and one cannot exist without the other. "Bare thoughts, free from linguistic material, free from linguistic natural matter - do not exist."

The practice of life with irrefutable logic proves that language does not exist without thought, and thought is necessarily embodied in linguistic natural "matter", since language is the immediate reality of thought, and in society its production, joint work, its progress is carried out through language as a tool development and struggle, because there is no more effective direct and rational way to exchange thoughts than language.

But, while asserting the connection between language and thought, we must firmly remember the need not to understand this connection as an identity.

In order to properly understand the role and significance of language for society, it is necessary to establish how the processes of thinking and its forms proceed in organic connection with the process of speech in cognition. We must always proceed from the fact that "neither thought nor language form in themselves a special kingdom, they are only manifestations of real life." How does the learning process take place?

Sensation, thought, consciousness are the highest product of matter organized in a special way. This specially organized matter is the human brain capable of thinking. Thinking is the process by which the objective world is reflected in consciousness. On the basis of the statements of the classics of Marxism, we can imagine how a person's knowledge occurs through direct perceptions and sensations and through indirect logical verbal thinking.

The sound side of the word is the material substratum of the language, its sensory basis, its "natural matter". The word and the sentence, as the basic units of the language, are physically reproducible and perceived. Without this, the language could not become a means of communication: the speaker could not formalize and formulate his thought, and the listener could not perceive the meaning of speech without sounds.

Of course, human thoughts can be expressed in other ways: through painting, music, dance, gesture. However, none of these methods has become such a comprehensive way that could convey thought in all its abstraction. Only sound language, the language of words, is capable of being such a perfect form of expression and thought formation.

Through the transfer of meanings, the language is enriched with new concepts-words under certain conditions for the development of material and spiritual culture society. Therefore, the language and its functions play the role of communication, cognition, perception, development of thinking, etc. The role of "language" is very important both for the Man and for the whole society as a whole.

Conclusion

I have made attempts to study the topic: "Language: essence, origin, functions, role and place in the life of society". In conclusion, I would like to make small generalizations on the issue under consideration, that is, to summarize and establish whether I have answered the questions I have posed.

As for the question of the origin of the language, it seems to me that the most reliable version of the origin of man is the theory of onomatopoeia, which M.S. Kozlova adheres to, where she says that at first people cuckooed, yelped, crowed, growled. And when we saved up words, then the life of our ancestor became easier.

Another argument in favor of the theory of onomatopoeia: if people learn language by imitating the sounds of other people, then who could the first people imitate? Only the sounds of nature.

What is the essence of language? It with different points view, definitions: language is a system of interrelated categories, which allowed a person to create and maintain a sign system of language (linguists); language is the ability to express one's thoughts reflected in consciousness, with the help of the nature of meanings, which, on the one hand, reflects, on the other hand, fixes a certain view of the world (philosophers). Does an ideal language exist?

I tried to consider this issue, as a result of which I came to the conclusion that the problem of an ideal language has not yet been solved, but attempts to resolve it have already been made, using the example of Russell, Wittgenstein.

There are two different concepts of speech and language. Speech - this is a specific speaking that takes place in sound or written form, this is everything that is said and written. Language is a system of signs and ways of connecting them, which serves as an instrument for expressing thoughts, feelings and will of people and is the most important means of human communication.

The language is capable of: reproduction, a tool of thinking, inner speech, universal human experience, self-regulation, a tool of cognition, which are inherent not to man, but to Man.

The exchange of thoughts is a constant and vital necessity, since without it it is impossible to organize joint actions of people in the struggle against the forces of nature, in the struggle for the production of the necessary material goods, it is impossible to achieve success in the production activities of society, which means that the very existence of social production and society itself is impossible. From what has been said, it follows that the place that language occupies in the life of society is at one of the highest levels of humanity.

Language and its functions play the role of communication, cognition, perception, development of thinking, etc. The role of "language" is very important both for the Man and for the whole society as a whole.

Bibliography

Donskikh O.A. "To the origins of language", 1988
Leontiev A.A. "Language and human mind", M., Politizdat, 1965.
Kozlova M.S. "Philosophy and language", M., 1972
Mechkovskaya N.B. "Language and Religion", M., 1989.

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