La sintaxis funcional

Abstract

Functional approaches have as a common trait the relevance of the term and concept “function”, understood as a relationship between entities internal to the language (structure) or as the orientation of language to the extralinguistic world (reference) and, more broadly, the interconnection of language with social reality, specified in communication as the exchange of linguistic information (meaning) through phonological forms, their sequential order and intonation. Although the initial non-existence of a structural syntax was due to the prevalence of the Saussurean “langue” and the methodological strength of Prague phonology, it is in the Prague School itself that functional syntax begins with the FSP (Functional Sentence Perspective: Mathesius, Firbas) and the functions of language towards the communicative environment (Jakobson). After the first approach of A. Alonso—initiator of “the Argentinian Functionalist School”—to the Geneva School and its attention to “parole”, stylistics (Ch. Bally) and syntax (A. Sechehaye), the application to Spanish of the new methodologies comes with E. Alarcos, whose work, with that of Martinet and Coseriu, deserves the double title of “structural-functional”. Halliday and Dik incorporate the discursive and pragmatic component (which becomes the mark of functionalism) into grammatical meaning, and this leads the current “Funcionalismo de la Costa Oeste” (Rojo y Vázquez 2003) to highlight the diversity and gradualness of uses when compared to the discrete categories of the linguistic system. Overall, Functional Syntax would have as its goal the construction of the meaning of the sentence (statement, discourse), from lexical items which, inflected, can form minimal predications or sentences, and thematic units, and then specify or quantify them, integrate or contrast them, through syntactic functions and other “grammatical” relationships and elements, thus obtaining more or less extensive units according to the circumstances of communication.