Describing Language

To Fulfill Assignment of Reading for Professional Purpose

Lecturer : Rudi Haryono, M.Pd.

Arranged by :
Sharla Putriani (0142S1C022006)
Sylvana Rahmawati (0142S1C022010)
Zeta Amani (0142S1C022013)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION DEPARTEMEN

FACULTY OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION
MUHAMMADIYAH BOGOR RAYA UNIVERSITY
2024
 PREFACE

Thanks to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala for giving us His blessing so that we were
able to finish this paper on time. We also would like to send blessings and greetings to the
great Prophet Muhammad Shallallahu ‘alaihi Wa Sallam, and his family, his companions
and all his people who are always consistent to be in the right path until the end of time.
The purpose of writing this paper is to fulfill the task of the subject named Semantics
which is in this paper we explain about “Describing Language”. We realize that this paper
is full of deficiencies. Therefore, we really have for criticism and suggestions for the
improvement of this paper. We hope that this paper can be useful and able to fulfill the
expectations of various parties.

Bogor, Novmber 8th 2024

Authors

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 TABLE OF CONTENS
PREFACE.............................................................................................................. II
TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................... III
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION .......................................................................... 1
A. Background ......................................................................................................... 1
B. Questions of Problems ........................................................................................ 1
C. Purposes .............................................................................................................. 2

CHAPTER II DISCUSSION ................................................................................ 3

A. Meaning of Context ............................................................................................ 3
B. The Element of Language ................................................................................... 3
C. Form and Meanings ............................................................................................ 4
D. Part of Speech ............................................................................................. 6
E. Hypothetical Meaning ......................................................................................... 6
F. Words Together .................................................................................................... 7
G. Language Function ............................................................................................. 8
H. Text and Discourse.............................................................................................. 8
I. Language Variables .............................................................................................. 9

CHAPTER III CLOSING .................................................................................. 12

A. Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 12
BIBILIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................. 13

III
 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

A. Background
Speaking is one of the key skills in second language acquisition that plays
an important role in everyday communication, whether in academic, professional
or social contexts. Despite its crucial role, teaching speaking skills often faces
various challenges, both in terms of students and teachers. Students often feel afraid
of making mistakes, lacking confidence, or limited by the influence of their native
language which hinders fluency. From the teacher's side, the challenges include
designing and implementing effective activities to encourage students to speak
actively and authentically.
Jeremy Harmer in chapter 5 of How to Teach Language Second Edition
discusses approaches and strategies that teachers can employ to overcome this
challenge. He highlights the importance of the teacher's role in creating a supportive
and motivating learning environment, as well as the use of various learning
techniques, such as group discussions, role-play, and other interactive activities that
allow students to practice speaking in real-life situations.
In this chapter, Harmer also delves into the principles of the communicative
approach, where the main focus of teaching is to encourage meaningful and
interactive language use. This theory emphasizes that language learning should
involve the practice of active language use, with the aim of building authentic and
effective communication skills.
Therefore, this paper aims to explore and analyze the approaches suggested
in chapter 5 of Harmer's book, as well as evaluate the effectiveness of these methods
in improving students' speaking skills. By understanding and applying these
strategies, it is hoped that teachers can help students overcome psychological and
linguistic barriers to speaking, and increase their participation and speaking ability
in the classroom.

B. Questions of Problem
1. What is the meaning of Language?

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2. What are the element of language?
3. What are forms and meaning?
4. What is part of speech?
5. What is hyphoteical meaning?
6. What are words together?
7. What is the function of language?
8. What is text and discourse?
9. How much the varieties of languages?

C. Purposes
1. To know the meaning of language
2. To know the element of language
3. To know forms and meaning
4. To know part of speech
5. To know hyphoteical meaning
6. To know words together
7. To know the function of language
8. To know text and discourse
9. To know the varieties of languages

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 CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION

A. Meaning of Context
The meaning of language depends on where it occurs within a larger stretch of
discourse, and thus the relationship that the different language elements have with what
comes before and after them. In other words, speakers and writers have to be able to operate
with more than just words and grammar; they have to be able to string utterances together.
Our ability to function properly in conversation or writing, in other words, depends
not only on reacting to the context in which we are using the language, but also on the
relationship between words and ideas in longer texts.
The following conversation takes place in the context of two people getting ready :
A : We can leave the ice here till we need it.
B : It's warm in here.
A : Is it? OK, then, let's find somewhere else.
The utterance 'It's warm in here' acts as a rejection of A's suggestion. A can then use
'it' to refer to the whole of B's proposition ('It's warm in here'). And 'OK' suggests that A
has absorbed all of the discourse so far (suggestion - rejection - agreement with the
rejection) and can then move the conversation on with a further suggestion.
Our ability to function properly in conversation or writing, in other words, depends
not only on reacting to the context in which we are using the language, but also on the
relationship between words and ideas in longer texts.

B. The Elements of Language

1. Grammar
Grammar is the set of rules that govern how words are used in the English language,
both in writing and speaking. It establishes a standard for how words, groups of
words, and sentences should be arranged.
2. Vocabulary
A vocabulary (also known as a lexicon) is a set of words, typically the set in a
language or the set known to an individual. The word vocabulary originated from

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 the Latin vocabulum, meaning "a word, name". It forms an essential component of
language and communication, helping convey thoughts, ideas, emotions, and
information. Vocabulary can be oral, written, or signed and can be categorized into
two main types: active vocabulary (words one uses regularly) and passive
vocabulary (words one recognizes but does not use often)
3. Pronunciation
The way the sentence is spoken will also determine exactly what it means. It can
refer to the standard pronunciation, which is the generally agreed-upon way to
speak a word or language in a specific dialect. It can also refer to how a particular
person speaks a word or language.

C. Form and Meanings

Just as in English there is sometimes no readily discernible correspondence between
sounds and spelling, there are frequent instances, too, where the same language forms can
be used to express different meanings, or where a meaning can be expressed by many
different forms.
1. One form, many meanings
The present continuous verb form ('is/are doing') can refer to both the present ('I'm
not listening') and the future ('I'm seeing him tomorrow'). It can be used to refer to
a temporary uncompleted event ("They are enjoying the weather') or to a series of
completed events ('He's always putting his foot in it'). The same basic form is being
used to express a nurnber of different concepts of time and duration. The same is
true of, for example, the present simple. He goes to work at 7 every day' to describe
a habit, versus 'Thierry Henry scores!" to describe something taking place now are
just two of its many uses. Other verb forms behave in the same way.
Words can also mean more than one thing, for example, 'book' (= something to read,
to reserve, a list of bets, etc), "beat' (= to win, to hit, to mix, e.g. an egg, the 'pulse'
of music/a heart) and 'can' (ability, permission, probability-and a container made of
metal). Notice that, in these examples, not only can the same form have many
meanings, but it can also be different parts of speech.
With so many available meanings for words and grammatical forms, it is the context

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 the word occurs in which determines which of these meanings is being referred to.
If we say, 'I beat him because I ran faster than he did', 'beat' is likely to mean won
rather than physically assaulted or mixed (though there is always the possibility of
ambiguity, of course). Likewise, the sentence 'I'm talking to the president' changes
dramatically if we use these different expressions: 'at this very minute' or 'tomorrow
at noon. One meaning, many forms A meaning or concept can be expressed in many
different ways. Consider, for example, the concept of the future. Different forms
can be used to express the sarne basic concept (though each form does have a
slightly different meaning).
2. One meaning, many forms
A meaning or concept can be expressed in many different ways. Consider, for
example, the concept of the future. Different forms can be used to express the same
basic concept (though each form does have a slightly different meaning).
Here are some examples :
 I'll see you tomorrow.
 I'm going to see you tomorrow.
 I'm seeing you tomorrow that's the arrangement, isn't it?
 I can get to you by about six o'clock.
 I see you at six, and afterwards I have a meeting with john.
The choice of which way to express futurity depends on whether the speaker wants
to talk about fixed arrangements, plans, schedules, offers, or just a simple concept
of the future with none of these overtones. Word meaning can also be expressed in
different ways. Even where words appear to have the same meaning to be synonyms
they are usually distinct from each other. For example, we can describe an
intelligent person by using a number of different words: 'intelligent, 'bright', 'brainy',
'clever', 'smart', etc. But each of these words has a different connotation (shade of
meaning). "Brainy' is an informal word and might well have a negative connotation
when used by a schoolchild about a classmate. 'Bright' carries the connotation of
lively and young.
"Smart' is commonly used in American English and has a slight connotation of
tricksiness, and 'clever' is often used in phrases with negative connotations, c.g. 'too

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 clever by half, "He may be clever but he's not going to get away with it.”

D. Part of Speech
1. Noun is a person, place, things or idea. Noun also a subject of the sentence.
Example : Kylie is a pro-golfer.
2. Pronouns is a word that take place of a noun, There are three basic of pronouns:
a. Personal Pronouns : I, You, They, We, She, He, It.
b. Relative Pronouns : Used to introduce relative clase. Ex. Who, Whose, Where,
Which, That.
c. Article and Determines : Used to identify or indicate the type of reference of the
noun phrase. Ex. The, A, An.
3. Adjective is a word that describes a noun or pronoun. It tell what kind, how many,
or which one. Kind of adjective:
a. Article : A, An, The
b. Demonstrative : That, This
c. Possessive : My, Yours, Hers
d. Numeral : One, Two, Three
4. Verb is the action o the sentence. It shows what someone or something is doing.
Example : Run, Eat, Shout.
5. Adverb describes how the action is performed. They tell how much, how often,
when, where something is done. Ex. The fish jump quickly from the water.
6. Preposition is a word that show position or direction. Ex. In, Out, Into, Up,
Between.
7. Conjunction is a word that joins word or words group together. Ex. FANBOYS

E. Hypothetical Meaning
When we talk about something that is not real, but that might be the case, we are talking
hypothetically. English has many ways of expressing hypothetical meaning.
a. Modal verbs
Modals are auxiliary verbs which we use to comment on the likelihood of
something. Thus, if we say‘It might rain’ we are saying that it is a hypothetical

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 possibility. If we say‘Perhaps I could be persuaded’ o r‘I would if I could’we are
hypothesising situations in which such eventualities are possible.
However, not all modal verbs express hypothetical meaning. ‘It will rain’ is a
statement of fact, and ‘I can’t go’ makes no concessions to the possibility of not
going.
b. Conditional sentences
Conditional sentences are formed when the conjunction ‘if’ is used to preface a
condition, e.g. ‘If it rains (condition), you’ll get wet (result)’. In this case, it is
quite likely that it will rain, and therefore the result is possible. However, if we
change the sentence to ‘If it rained, you would get wet’ we are suggesting that the
chance of it raining is unlikely - in other words, we are talking hypothetically -
and this is signalled by the use of ‘would’ rather than ‘will’. A further change of
verb tense/form (using the past perfect) will produce an impossible condition, e.g.
‘If it had rained, you would have got wet’.

F. Words together
Students frequently worry about the meaning of individual words. Yet a marked
feature of the way we construct and understand language is that far from putting together
strings if individual words, we actually use collections of vocabulary items that frequently
occur together in pairs of groups, as this excerpt from the novel Small Island by Andrea
Levy (about Jamaican immigrants to Britain ) makes clear:
Louis now believed bloodyforeigner to be all one word. For, like bosom pals, he only ever
heard those words spoken together.
We will look at three specific instances of words that group together: collocations, lexical
chunks and idiom.
a) Collocations
If any two words occur together more often than just by chance, we often call them
collocations. In other words, when you hear the word ‘asleep’ there is a good chance
that the word ‘fast’ will be used with it (‘fast asleep’). In the example above, Louis
has worked out that if he hears the word ‘pals’, the word ‘bosom’ will be hovering
around, too, and he never hears the word ‘foreigner’ occurring without ‘bloody’ in

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 front of it.
b) Lexical chunks
Corpuses have shown us something else we have always been aware of - but
which is now more demonstrably the case. This is that words group together into
longer lexical phrases or lexical chunks. Lexical chunks are strings of words
which behave almost as one unit. Some of these are fixed (which means you can’t
change any of the words, e.g. over the moon, out of the blue), and some of them
are semi-fixed (which means you can change some of the words, e.g. nice to see
you/good to see you/great to see you, etc).

G. Language Function
A language function is a purpose you wish to achieve when you say or write
something. By ‘performing’ the function, you are performing an act of communication. If
you say ‘I apologise’, you are performing the function of apologising; if you say ‘I promise’,
you are performing the function of promising. But functions are more often performed
without using verbs like this at all. We can apologise by saying ‘sorry’ and invite someone
not by saying ‘I invite you’ but by saying things like ‘D’you fancy coming round for a
meal?’. As we have seen above, there are many ways of recommending a course of action.
Many functional exponents (patterns or phrases) are exactly the kind of lexical phrases we
discussed above.

H. Text and Discourse

Much of this paper has dealt with language at the level of words and utterances
(sentences, questions, etc in speech). However, as we saw at the very beginning, utterances
are generally part of a longer stretch of spoken discourse. In writing, sentences are usually
part of a longer text. In order to be an effective language user, therefore, speakers and
writers need to be able to operate with longer texts (stretches of discourse) as well as with
words, phrases, sentences and questions.
We will now look at cohesion, coherence and the special features of spoken face-
to-face discourse.
a. Cohesion

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 Cohesion refers to the devices we use to stick text together - the way we connect
ideas and sentences together. Lexical cohesion involves using words and groups of
words throughout a text to bind a topic together. Grammatical cohesion, on the other
hand, uses pronouns, articles and tense agreement, among other devices, for the
same purpose. In the following passage, describing a primary teacher’s first day
with a new class, lexical cohesion is achieved by the use of a group of related topic-
words (‘thuglets’, ‘boys’, ‘girls’, ‘young lad’, ‘children’).
b. Coherence
Cohesion will make no difference to the success of a text if it is not coherent. The
following four sentences (about the same teacher working on notions of perception)
are perfectly well formed, but the text makes no sense because it has no internal
logic: the ideas are in the wrong order.
She opened it and took a large spoonful. She held up the tin. Ignoring the children’s
shocked faces, she put the spoon into her mouth. It was marked ‘Dog food’.
When a text is coherent - when it has some internal logic - the readers should be
able to perceive the writer’s purpose and follow their line of thought.
c. Conversational discourse
Many of the same elements of cohesion and coherence apply to face-to-face spoken
discourse as well. But in speech we can also use ellipsis for grammatical cohesion,
and participants need to be proficient at turn-taking, the conversational convention
that requires that only one person speak at any one time. Moreover, if the
conversation is to be successful, speakers should avoid long silences, and should
listen when someone else is speaking.

I. Language Variables
The way English speakers use systems of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation is
dependent upon a number of variables. We will look at speaking and writing, register and
language varieties.
a. Speaking and writing
The way we put words together in correct sequences is often influenced by whether
or not we are doing it in speech or writing. For example, we find that in conversation

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 we tend to use more contractions (e.g. ‘it is’ contracted to ‘it’s’, ‘I have’ contracted
to ‘I’ve’ ) than in writing. In speech we might well shorten ‘It’s warm in here’ to
‘Warm in here’ or even ‘Warm’, though such ellipsis is less likely in writing.
However, the choice of whether something is more or less speaking-like or writing-
like may depend on the register the speaker is using.
Students of English need to be able to recognise the difference between more
speaking-like and writing-like language, and to use these differences
creatively.Recent computer research has also shown that words are used differently
in speech and writing. ‘However’ is more common in writing than speaking, for
example, but ‘started’ is much more common than ‘began’ in speaking. People use
‘go’ and ‘be like’ to mean ‘said’ (‘She goes/She’s like “How are you feeling?” and
I go/I’m like “Not so bad” ...’) in speech but almost never in writing.
Because speaking is often face-to-face and interactive, speakers can use
paralinguistic (or non-language) features, such as changing their tone of voice,
giving added emphasis, whispering and shouting or speaking faster or slower. They
can use gesture and expression to modify their meanings, too.
b. Register
Our choice of words is also determined by the register we are speaking in. Register
refers to both the topic we are speaking about and the tone (for example formal or
informal) that we wish to adopt. Thus, for example, in a weather forecast we would
expect to hear topic words such as ‘depression’, ‘cold front’, ‘moving in from ...’,
‘temperatures’ and ‘hot’, ‘cool’ and ‘warm’.
c. Language Varieties
English is not just one language, of course. There are many different varieties. Even
if we take just British English for example, we will find that whereas a speaker
from southern England might say ‘It’s really warm in here’, someone from
Newcastle in the north of England might say ‘It’s right warm in here’ (where ‘right’
is pronounced ‘reet’). There are regional variations in Britain in pronunciation,
word choice and grammar.
The status of English as one language is challenged by the many different
‘Englishes’ being used around the world, and notions of the ownership of English

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have shifted dramatically. Although there are still many people who advocate using
a native-speaker model to teach English, there is growing acceptance of the concept
of an International English, used as a common language of communication by
people whose native language is not English. This International English belongs to
everyone who speaks it, but it is no one’s mother tongue.

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 CHAPTER III
CLOSING

A. Conclusion
In this paper, we have explored various aspects of language and how meaning is
conveyed in different contexts, noting that the function of what we say may differ from the
literal words used. We explained grammar as a structured system where specific parts of
speech fit into particular ‘slots’ like subject and verb. Additionally, we discussed the nature
of words and their morphology and examined pronunciation elements, including sounds,
stress, pitch, and intonation. We highlighted that there is no direct one-to-one relationship
between a language form and a single meaning, as different forms can express the same
meaning, and one form can convey multiple meanings. We reviewed components of the
noun phrase, adjectives, prepositions, determiners, verb phrases, adverbs, and connecting
words. The concept of hypothetical meaning was discussed in the context of modal verbs
and conditional sentences. We also detailed how words combine in collocations, lexical
phrases, and idioms, and briefly mentioned language functions. Furthermore, we examined
text and discourse, focusing on cohesion and coherence, and referenced language variables
such as the differences between spoken and written English, various registers, and language
varieties.

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 BIBILIOGRAPHY

Harmer, Jeremy. 2007. How to Teach English. Pearson Longman

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