formal/functional

Dick Hudson dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK
Fri Feb 25 08:22:43 UTC 2000


I agree wholeheartedly with Alan Dench, who says:

"I disagree with a number of the recent postings about the value of formal
work, the nature and use of data, and from my heart with the sharp divide
that some seem to want to draw between functionalist and formalist."

The discussion on this list is often fascinating, but can turn into the
exchange of slogans, which encourage people to paint themselves into
corners that they may not really want to defend.

Some people give the impression that they think there are no linguistic
facts which demand a 'formal' (rather than 'pragmatic') explanation. That
seems to imply a rejection on principle of rules such as agreement between
a noun and its modifying adjective:

Data A:
bon ami         bonne amie         bons  amis      bonnes amies

This is surely a purely formal rule, in the sense that it is sensitive only
to the intra-linguistic relations between the words concerned:

Rule A:
If an adjective modifies a noun, the adjective agrees in number and gender
with the noun.

I imagine everyone would be happy to accept a rule such as this, even if
they then went on to provide a functional explanation for why it exists
(e.g. to help keep track of grammatical relations). Or do some of our
colleagues really believe that explanations such as Rule A are
misconceived and should be replaced by *purely* pragmatic explanations? And
if so, how would the explanation work?

Maybe some people mean something different by 'formal' when they contrast
it with 'functional'? Both Mathew Dryer and John Myhill contrast it with
'descriptive', and seem to reserve 'formal' for a specifically Chomskyan
approach to grammar, complete with abstract structures etc. That's quite
confusing, since much of 'descriptive' grammar is purely formal in the more
general sense of simply stating formal patterns of syntax and morphology,
rather than relating them to pragmatic functions. Maybe we could do with a
clarification of terminology:

'formal' = involving relations within language
'functional' = involving relations between language and its use
'Chomskyan' = Chomskyan
'formal grammar' = (study of) grammar where external relations are left
unanalysed
'functional grammar' = (study of) grammar where some formal patterns are
explained in terms of functional patterns.


Dick Hudson


Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)171 419 3152; fax +44(0)171 383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm



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