Steven Pinker considers how language works in his book "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language." Verb phrases such as "eating at the table," "furiously fought," or "would have sold the house in July" indicate action, notes Pinker. Noun phrases, such as "dog in garden," eccentric professor," or "financial catastrophe hovering over the country in the summer of 2008," indicate things. Languages differ in how they indicate action and things--"Hund" in German equals "dog" in English or "perro" in Spanish--but linguistic variations make no difference to verbal communication so long as the action and things are effectively conveyed and understood.
As Pinker observes, a language must have some way to show how things relate to each other and to action. In languages like Latin and Russian, explicit tags attached to nouns (declensions) indicate who is doing what for whom with what instrument and where. By contrast, English relies much more on word order. Whether an English speaker says "The warden wrote a prisoner a letter" or "A prisoner wrote the warden a letter" makes a big difference to the meaning conveyed, even though the words are exactly the same.
Verbal communication needs to specify. Exactly what action? Is it past, future or only possible? Exactly what quality? People in the Berinmo tribe use two words for "yellow" to specify different shades, observes the book "Psychology, Sixth Edition," by David Myers. By contrast, English speakers might use the adjectives "light" or "dark" tacked onto "yellow." To specify action, Europeans explicitly conjugate verbs, whereas Chinese do not always do so, observes the book "Social Psychology, Second Edition," by Roger Brown. Again, verbal communication demands no particular linguistic forms, but it does demand ways to achieve specification.
Besides verbs, nouns, and adjectives, verbal communication requires ways to integrate chunks of meaning (phrases) to form statements that may be either true or false (sentences). This is accomplished by "function words," according to Pinker. Including the conjunctions "and" and "or;" the articles "the" and "a;" and words that introduce complements like "that" and "to," such words suggest conceptual frameworks within which verb and noun phrases fit. For example, "The farm boy from Oscoloosa" (noun phrase), "fervently hoped" (verb phrase one), and "go to the ballgame" (verb phrase two) require the insertion of a function word between "hoped" and "go." Inserting the word "to," the speaker achieves the sentence: "The farm boy from Oscoloosa fervently hoped to go to the ballgame."