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What can language do—the most ready answer is to communicate. By communicating, we mean "getting information across". Most people assume that the informative function of language is the primary one, but it probably represents not more than 20 percent of what takes place in verbal communication.
A list of LANGUAGE FUNCTIONs can be endless: Ask questions, ask for help, express ideas, express feelings, give warning, express thanks and so on.
An influential group of linguists—functionalists ask questions such as: How do people use language? And how is language structured for use? Can we differentiate between different types of meanings in language? —how many different sorts of meanings do we use language to make? How are texts structured so that meanings can be made? —how is language organized to make meanings? Here we follow Halliday (2003) in stating briefly the three broad functions of language—the highly summarized functions of language:
(1) to talk about what is happening, what will happen and what has happened: Language is used to organize, understand and express our perceptions of the world and of our own consciousness. This function is known as the ideational function.
(2) to interact and/or express a point of view: Language is used to enable us to participate in communicative acts with other people, to take on roles and to express and understand feelings, attitude and judgments. This is the so called interpersonal function.
(3) to turn the output of the previous two functions into a whole in the spoken or written text: Language is used to relate what is said (or written) to the real world and to other linguistic events. This involves the use of language to organize the text itself. It is known as textual function.
At this stage we need only remember these are functions operating simultaneously in the expression of meaning. If you are not satisfied with this approach to language functions, just keep in mind two things. First, language functions are various; giving and receiving information is only one of them. Secondly, language functions are always related to its lexico-grammatical structures. To get a detailed understanding of this, you may turn to functional grammar for further study. In our course book chapter 6 we will deal with grammar and the textual function.