Functional Linguistics: Communicative Functions and Language Structure

This chapter introduces the reader to the basic ideas of functional linguistics and to give an account of how the ideas that today constitute functional linguistics arose. It explains how many professional linguists came to adopt a view of language which is so strikingly at odds with the view held by nonlinguists. A number of terms and distinctions are introduced that are relevant to elucidating functionalist and formalist approaches to the study of language. In functional linguistic analysis, forms are analyzed with respect to the communicative functions they serve, and functions are investigated with respect to the formal devices that are used to accomplish them. This is followed by a brief history of twentieth-century linguistics and the development of the relevant ideas about language structure and function. Contemporary functional linguistics are then characterized and contrasted with formal linguistics, to see how genuine the opposition really is.