Functional-typological approaches to grammar

As we mentioned earlier, functional approaches to language, particularly the functional-typological approach, have informed and influenced the cognitive approach in a number of important ways. In this section, we briefly summarise the characteristics of functional-typological approaches to grammar. This section owes much to Croft (2003). For sources that provide a more in-depth introduction to functional-typological approaches, we refer the reader to the further reading section at the end of the chapter.

A functional approach to language is any approach that places particular emphasis on the communicative and social functions of language, and attempts to explain the grammatical properties of language in terms of how it is used. In this respect, functional approaches tend to be less concerned with the psychological representation of language as a system of knowledge and more concerned with its use. Functional approaches therefore characterise grammatical phenomena in terms of discourse, pragmatic, sociolinguistic and cultural properties. One of the best-known functional approaches to grammar is Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, which holds that language is organised to reflect ideational and interpersonal meaning (Halliday 1994: xiii). According to Halliday, ideational meaning reflects the speaker’s attempt to understand his or her environment while interpersonal meaning reflects the speaker’s objectives in terms of influencing other people within that environment. This approach is called ‘systemic’ because it conceives the grammar as a system of choices available to the speaker in achieving his or her goals. Unlike many other approaches to grammar, the systemic functional approach does not stop at the sentence but looks at both written and spoken texts, since it is only by analysing the interaction between speakers within these larger pieces of language that one can discover the communicative functions of language. In this respect, the functional approach lends itself to discourse analysis (see the critical approach to discourse analysis proposed by Norman Fairclough (e.g. 2001) for an influential application of Halliday’s approach to discourse). Within Halliday’s framework, a clause is analysed in terms of three ‘strands of meaning’ (Halliday 1994: 33): message (the information conveyed by the clause), exchange (the communicative transaction between speaker and hearer represented by the clause, for example offer versus request) and representation (the way in which the clause represents a construal of some aspect of human experience, for example saying, thinking or doing).

The functional-typological approach shares these concerns to the extent that it attempts to explain typological patterns in terms of language use. Croft (2003: 4–5) points out that while generative grammar emerged as a reaction against behaviourist psychology, linguistic typology emerged as a reaction against ‘anthropological relativism’: the idea that languages can vary in arbitrary and unconstrained ways. As we saw in Chapter 3, linguistic typologists have discovered that while languages can and do vary, cross-linguistic variation is constrained. From the perspective of linguistic typology, it is the constraints on variation that make up the universals of language, rather than a set of universal principles. This means that while generative linguists assume an innate Universal Grammar as the basis of linguistic universals, functional typologists appeal to functional and cognitive explanations for these universals. For example, two of the major explanations posited by typologists to account for cross-linguistic patterns are economy and iconicity. Croft (2003: 116) argues that both relate to language use in the sense that they relate to language processing. For example, it is economical for a language to shorten frequently used forms (recall from Chapter 21 that grammaticalised forms are reduced or shortened). Iconicity refers to the way that language ‘mirrors’ experience. For example, the tendency for some languages to present old information before new information in an utterance represents iconicity between language and experience, because new experiences happen later than old ones (Croft 2003: 202). As we have seen, a number of typologists also adopt some version of a semantic map model in accounting for typological patterns (Croft 2003: 133). A semantic map is the language-specific typological pattern which rests upon a universal conceptual space (recall our discussion of the semantic map for case systems in Chapter 21). Finally, as we saw in Chapter 21, the term emergent grammarcoined by the functional typologist and grammaticalisation scholar Paul Hopper (1987) sums up the cognitive and usage-based nature of the functional-typological approach:

The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or regularity, comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as it shapes discourse in an on-going process [. . . Grammar’s] forms are not fixed templates, but are negotiable in face-to-face inter action in ways that reflect the individual speakers’ past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context, including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assessments may be quite different. Moreover, the term Emergent Grammar points to a grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented, but always anchored in the specific concrete form of an utterance. (Hopper 1987: 142, cited in Croft 2003: 289)

As Croft (2003: 5) points out, there is considerable agreement between generative and functional-typological approaches with respect to the existence of cross-linguistic universals, the search for what defines a ‘possible human language’ and the close attention to linguistic form. However, the functional typological tradition departs from the generative tradition and is more closely aligned with cognitive approaches in its rejection of specialised innate linguistic knowledge (Universal Grammar), in its appeal to non-linguistic aspects of cognition to explain the properties of language, and in its emphasis on language function and use. Finally, as we saw in Chapter 21, large-scale samples of the kind compiled by typologists have also formed the basis of grammaticalization studies, which represent one of the areas in which the functional-typological approach has been particularly influential in the development of cognitive approaches to grammar. Table 22.3 summarises the key characteristics of the functional-typological approach.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

تقديم المحاضرة السابعة من محفل نهج البلاغة الأسبوعي في ذي قار

مركز السيد جعفر الحلي يواصل تقديم خدماته الصحية للزائرين

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تحيي ذكرى هدم قبور أئمّة البقيع (عليهم السلام) في الصحن الشريف

تقديم المحاضرة السادسة من محفل نهج البلاغة الأسبوعي في بغداد

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

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الوجه المظلم لـ"فيتامين B2" في معركة الجسم مع السرطان

فيروس بيئي يهزم "السالمونيلا" ويعزز سلامة الغذاء

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

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المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

The status of tree diagrams

Constituency: heads and dependents

Word classes

Core issues in grammar: comparing cognitive and generative accounts

Cognitive versus generative models

Who were the creators of early language?

Functions of early language Discussion

Motivations underlying grammaticalization

Cognition or communication?

Functions of early language

Word order

From non-language to language