Attachment is a Latin term derived from adiungĕre (“to add”). It came to our language as an adjunct, a concept that can be used as an adjective or as a noun.
The first meaning of attachment mentioned by the dictionary of the Digopaul refers to what is linked to something else. Based on this idea, the notion is used in different contexts.
When the adjective is applied to a person, it makes reference to accompanying, guarding or supporting another in the development of a mission or a job. For example: “My son was appointed deputy director of the company, I am very proud”, “The family of the victim is not satisfied with the actions of the deputy prosecutor”, “Controversial statements on a television program by the deputy spokesman for the Conservative Party “.
In the field of grammar, an attached complement is one that is not essential to understand the meaning of the term you are modifying. Thus, the use of the attached plugin is optional. This is a particular case of syntactic complement, since these syntactic constituents are needed to expand or clarify the meaning of a certain phrase.
In a phrase there may be others, minor, and only some of them are mandatory for understanding the message; these are simply called complements, while the others are the adjuncts, as it appears in the X-bar Theory about phrases and their structure, elaborated by Ray Jackendoff.
While transitive verbs usually have an indispensable subject to fulfill the role of specifier, and a mandatory complement (the so-called direct object, circumstantial or adverbial phrases are adjuncts to it, since they do not genuinely or absolutely complement it). appreciate these elements in the following example: “The musician took the violin with his right hand. ”
As a noun, adjunto is the name of a position or a rank. An adjunct can be an assistant or an assistant who is in the service of someone who occupies a higher position in the internal hierarchy of the organization: “Please ask my associate for the documents”, “The university authorized me to hire an adjunct to the development of the postgraduate course ”.
An attachment, finally, is a document that is added to an e-mail: “I just send the budget in an attachment”, “This file is too heavy to send as an attachment, so you should share it through from the cloud ”, “ The limit of megabytes that we can send in attachments has increased considerably in the last decade ”.
While the concept of an attachment is very common today, it’s worth noting that when it was first offered to the general public as an option for email users it represented a major advance. Being able to share more than text messages is essential for many work activities, but it is also attractive and comfortable for informal conversations: from documents to videos, the only limit is the weight of the files.
Nowadays we can send attachments not only through the email service, but almost all the programs that allow us to communicate with others, such as instant messaging and social media chat. Initially, this option simply led us to browse our directories for the files we wanted to send, but over time different companies began to develop smarter interfaces that quickly identify different types of documents, such as images, music and videos, to speed up this exploration and offer functions such as the preview of the same.
