formal/functional

[Michael Barlow]

Dick Hudson says:
> 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:

Dick, like many people, turns to agreement as the prototypical formal relation
and was obviously not expecting any argument on this score. However, I
wouldn't accept that agreement rules are "sensitive only to the
intra-linguistic relations between the words concerned" (nor would I accept
that agreement rules are semantically/pragmatically based). I have argued that
agreement should be seen as a discourse relation, and the particulars of that
approach neatly straddle Dick's formal/functional divide. But in thinking
about it, one could also perhaps argue that treatments of agreement in formal
grammars such as minimalism or HPSG are functional on Dick's definition since
they include "language in use" components, namely, co-indexing and referential
indices.

The main thrust of Dick's remark, however, is to question whether anyone would
reject a purely formal rule on principle. I suppose that many functionalists
on the list would see a formal rule as only a partial description. One central
problem here is that formal rules don't just come along with the data. There
is no formal rule in the agreement examples Dick gave; there are only
(written) forms. He sees a formal rule linking those forms, but others don't.

Michael