2 - GRAMMAR AND FUNCTION: toward a discourse definition of syntax

Abstract

This chapter discusses grammar and function toward a discourse definition of syntax. Given a rather theory-neutral goal for a syntactic description, the one of attempting to account for the inventory of meaningful elements in a language and their distributions, one may observe that the greatest distributional freedom and variety of meaningful elements occurs in the main, declarative, affirmative active clause-type. This is true of the distribution of both lexical items and syntactic constructions. On the other hand, the distribution of meaningful elements, both lexical items and syntactic constructions, in all other sentence–clause types is always more constrained. Formally, the dependency argument involves the assertion that given the syntactic variants B, C, D and the neutral pattern A, one can show that the structure of B, C, D is a function of the structure of A, but not vice versa. Underlying the economy argument, in all scientific inquiry, is the tacit assumption that in the absence of any empirical grounds for choosing between two alternative formalisms models, which describe the data in an equally exhaustive fashion, the mathematically less complex model is to be preferred.