What Do You Mean By The Term 'Reflexivity' In A Language?

What do you mean by the term 'Reflexivity' in a language?

By the term 'Reflexivity' in language we mean the capacity and the tendency of verbal interaction to assume, structure, represent, and characterize its own functioning. Reflexivity is the defining features of natural languages. It is also the discursive practices implemented through them. It has been of increasing concern in linguistic anthropology and the fields that related over the last quarter of century. When we make language form and use the subject matter of our speech, reflexivity can be explicit. It is most crystal clear when we honestly speak about the language code, inferring, e.g. the meaning of a lexical form. Similar interpretation can be given by larger idiomatic constructions. Examples of grammatically oriented comments may include classifying verbs as to formal type, presenting grammatical rules, or assessing grammatical correctness. Similar statements can also be practiced about phonological rules or larger discursive patterns. All these cases focus on comparatively stable aspects of language code structure especially when they contribute to acts of reference.

However, regular patterns of language usage can also be commented. Hence we come across the characterizations of typical or suitable use. In cases of this type, the focus is on practical rules of use, that is who uses definite forms, in what perspectives and to what effect. The concern is not referential exactness but broader discursive correctness.

Whether these explicitly reflexive utterance concern structure or use, it focuses on general patterns rather than particular utterances. It can also be possible to use speech to report particular utterances. Such utterances may have really occurred, or they may not have, being only supposed or imagined.

Language is one of the devices that we use not only for communication our ideas, thoughts and desires to other person, but also for exposing them to our own awareness or consciousness, the thoughts and ideas would normally occur in an implicit form in our brains: they would influence our actions and responses but they would not be open to our awareness or reasoning. This is the reason why man alone has been considered to be rationale, we have the ability to encode these thoughts in the form of linguistic expressions and make them exclusive. The characteristic of a language that permits us to consciously examine and evaluate its expressions and also the structure and context of those expressions is called reflexivity.

Examining another feature of 'system' we find that in English, adjectives don't agree with nouns. 'We say the boys are tall' and 'the tall boys'; and 'the tall girls'. In our language, changes may occur because of singular or plural. By now, you must have understood how the various system of language functions to make language as a whole system of these systems.
As described above, language is a system consisting of two sub-systems. One is the sub-system of meaningful units and the other is the sub-system of sounds which have no meaning in them, but which form meaning units.