CSEC ENGLISH

nudge it closer to the required total; and Step 5 - Reread to make sure the passage flows nicely.

“It is clear, if we look and listen, that language is used for more than one purpose. The man who hits his thumb-nail with a hammer and utters a string of curses is using language for an expressive purpose: he is relieving his feelings, and needs no audience but himself. People can often be heard playing with language: children especially like using language as if it were a toy—repeating, distorting, inventing, punning, jingling; and there is a play element in the use of language in some literature. But when the philosopher uses language to clarify is ideas on a subject, he is using it as an instrument of thought. When two women gossip over the fence, or two men exchange conventional greetings as they pass in the street, language is being used to strengthen the bonds of cohesion between the members of a society. Language, it seems is a multi-purpose instrument. One function, however, seems to be basic: language enables us to influence people’s behaviour and to influence it in detail, and thereby makes human cooperation possible. Some animals co-operate, especially the social animals like bees and ants: but human cooperation is more thorough, more detailed, more effective than that found anywhere in the animal kingdom, and no animal society has a division of labour or a system of production at all comparable to those of human societies. This human co-operation would be unthinkable without language, and it is obviously this function of language that has made it so successful and so important; other functions can be looked upon as by-products. An language, of course, always belongs to a group of people, not to an individual; the group that uses any given language is called the speech community.” (Source not known. If any reader can let us know the source, we will appreciate it.)

ANSWERS