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I have a disagreement with the suggestion that “grammar is often said to be the trunk and branches of a language while vocabulary and functions are the leaves that add beauty and variety.” I am not sure where this is presumed to be sourced, but regardless, I disagree with the premise. I would argue that vocabulary is the trunk because you can communicate with vocabulary only, if needed. Grammar and functions are of course needed to enable more robust communication, and are essential to convey abstract thoughts coherently, however, if I am on a remote island, alone with one or several other people who do not share my language, we can quickly build communication using single vocabulary words to allow us to survive. We can quickly come to agreement on what ‘sounds’ we will produce to convey fire, water, food, danger, etc. Further, we can string together multiple vocabulary without getting too twisted over simple grammar, such as word order, and yet still effectively communicate. So, I would respectfully say vocabulary is the trunk. I found the section about functions to be very interesting and helpful. As someone who has written computer programs during my career, I have not previous considered that this term, as applied to language generically, would be defined as ‘inviting, refusing, agreeing, disagreeing, and suggesting…’. The term function as commonly used with computer programming, while described differently, nonetheless conveys the same ‘idea’, and this is very helpful to me in the teaching of ESL.
