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26 3 The Building Blocks of Language During one of my creative writing classes in college, the professor started a discussion with the question, “What do writers want?” After the surprised students fumbled around a bit, the professor answered her own question by stating, “They want to be read.” Indeed, at the most basic level, this is what communicators want: writers want people to read their works; speakers want people to listen to them. The reason for that desire, more often than not, is that the writers and speakers believe they have something to say that other people should want to read or hear. In other words, they want to communicate something to their audiences , and they want the audiences to understand them and to learn. The task of language, of course, is to facilitate such communication . In order to be understood by as many people as possible , and with as little effort on the audience’s part as possible, a speaker or writer must know how to use the language of the audience well (whether or not that is his own language). Conversely, if a student is trying to understand a lecture or a written work in another language, he must be sufficiently familiar with the way that language facilitates communication in general and with the way that particular speaker or writer uses the language. How, then, do languages facilitate communication? In short, they do this by the way they use words and by the way they convey the relations between the words. The basic building blocks of communication are the words that convey the author’s meaning .1 These words have different usages (often called “mean1 . This assertion is oversimplified, because actually the most basic building blocks of a language are the sounds from which the words are made. Oral The Building Blocks of Language 27 ings”), and they fall into different types or categories (called “parts of speech” or “word classes”). These words are combined into phrases, clauses, and sentences, and the sentences are in turn combined into paragraphs and sections. In this chapter, we will get started understanding these building blocks of communication by looking at the varied usages of words, at the different kinds of words (“parts of speech” or “word classes”), and at the way the words are related one to another (grammar or syntax). Words and Their Usages One of my mentors, Dr. Loyd Melton, is fond of beginning his New Testament interpretation classes in any given semester by placing a coffee cup on the table in front of him, pointing to it, and announcing, “That is a dog.” He then proceeds to refer to the cup as a dog for the entire semester, and in imitation of him, the students often refer to their coffee cups as dogs when talking among themselves. Dr. Melton’s point in this exercise is to show students that words do not have rigid meanings; they have usages. Another of my mentors, Dr. Matthew Ristuccia, expresses the same idea when he cautions his students, “Don’t make a word into a term.” Let us think about this idea for a moment. The difference between a word and a term is that a word can be used in a variety of different ways in different situations and by different speakers/writers, whereas a term is a word that is always used the same way. Rarely is a word born as a term, since people do not normally make up a term by putting sounds together into a word no one has ever used before. More often, they take an existing word and make it into a term when they agree that they will use the word the same way every time. Terms are useful because they provide precision in communication, but language is prior to and more foundational than written language, and by the time a language is written down, it has already passed its infancy and childhood and is into its adolescence. An important part of the study of language (even the study of a language one does not have to speak) is the study of its sound groups and how these combine to make roots, suffixes, and prefixes that shape the way the words will be used. In spite of the importance of this area of study, this book will not deal with it, but will instead take the words as the basic building blocks and focus on how those words are combined into phrases, clauses...

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