Functional Theories of Grammar

Abstract

Theories of grammar, grammatical analyses, and grammatical statements may be divided into three types: structural, formal, and functional. Structural grammar describes such grammatical structures as phonemes, morphemes, syntactic relations, semantics, interclause relations, constituents, dependencies, sentences, and occasionally, as with tagmemics and glossematics, texts and discourses. Formal grammar analyzes the same range of phenomena, but does so by constructing a formal model of language. The model itself is the object of description, and the language phenomena only the means of description, the material on which arguments are based. Thus formal and structural grammar share a great deal, and in fact formal grammar is a recent outgrowth of the structural tradition represented by, for example, Bloomfield. Functional grammar broadens its purview beyond these structural phenomena, and hence its theoretical outlook is distinctive. It analyzes grammatical structure, as do formal and structural grammar; but it also analyzes the entire communicative situation: the purpose of the speech event, its participants, its discourse context. Functionalists maintain that the communicative situation motivates, constrains, explains, or otherwise determines grammatical structure, and that a structural or formal approach is not merely limited to an artificially restricted data base, but is inadequate even as a structural account. Functional grammar, then, differs from formal and structural grammar in that it purports not to model but to explain; and the explanation is grounded in the communicative situation. It should be emphasized that althoughfunction andfunctional have partly similar senses in linguistics and anthropology, functionalism in linguistics is quite different from functionalism in anthropology. Linguistic functionalism combines certain theoretical advances of formal grammar with the concerns