Chapter II, Part 2  

II.D. Generative studies of language 

75. Generativism can designate an approach for relating language to the intuitive knowledge of speakers and to the mental capacities of humans at large. (Among various definitions of the term, this one seems dominant.) Historically, it purported to originate as a consummately modernist project more advanced than descriptivism, but ideologically it resonates partly with the ‘pre-modernist’ project of idealism in 17^th century Europe,⁵⁹ which addressed ideas more than language; and partly with the early modernist project of formal logic of the 20^th century, one pillar of ‘unified science’ (I.81). Now, the ideology of mentalism, which had long before sponsored the dichotomies between ‘synchronic’ versus ‘diachronic’ and ‘langue’ versus ‘parole’ (II.40f), gained ascendancy.

76. Formal logic, as the term indicates, mainly concerns relations within and among arrays or strings of forms. This concern fit the centrality accorded to Syntax by generative linguistics⁶⁰ when a ‘language’ was defined as a system (or ‘grammar’)⁶¹ of formal rules for generating an ‘infinite set of well-formed sentences’.⁶² This arcane definition should attract linguists who want to explain why the system of a language always remains open, and the set of instances is never complete; and who like to believe that the regularities in a language are due to ‘rules’, and that the sentence is the primary linguistic unit and the longest unit for linguistic study.⁶³ In return, the definition implied some incisive evasions. ‘Generate’ does not at all mean ‘produce’ a sentence, but just means ‘assign it a structural description’ with no regard for its production; so despite the polemics,⁶⁴ the ‘generative’ approach was after all a rarefied or diluted ‘descriptive’ approach. Besides, terms like ‘rule’ and ‘sentence’ carry different senses in formal logic than in studies of language. And an ‘infinite set’ in the strict sense of mathematics would eventually produce every combination, however wildly improbable, just as, in the familiar parable, a roomful of chimpanzees randomly pecking at with typewriters would, in infinite time, write the complete works of Shakespeare.⁶⁵ By implication, the act of comprehending a sentence could require infinite processing time to search an infinite set of possible combinations.

77. Undeniably, generativism has sharply veered toward more theoretical con-ceptions of ‘language’ (II.67), until the term no longer designates a medium for real communication. Instead, the term designates an ‘internal’ and ‘universal’ system anchored in some mental or genetic human potential, of which any one language like English merely constitutes an ‘external’ instance.⁶⁶ The relation might seem comparable to the relation between a language (or ‘langue’) and an individual discourse (or ‘parole’), but I doubt it. ‘Internal’ versus ‘external’ relates two fairly abstract systems, whereas ‘language’ versus ‘discourse’ relates an abstract (virtual) system with a concrete (actual) system (cf. II.113).

78. Meanwhile, the practices of generative linguists have been mainly argumentative, advancing large claims on the basis of small data sets,⁶⁷ usually isolated, invented sentences, like ‘sincerity may frighten the boy’ adduced for ‘observing that the rules of grammar impose a partial order in terms of dominance’:

[46] we can define the degrees of deviation[by] substituting a lexical item in the position of ‘frighten’.[…] Thus we should have the following order of deviance: (1) ‘sincerity may virtue the boy’; (ii) ‘sincerity may elapse the boy’; (iii) ‘sincerity may admire the boy’.  This seems to give a natural explication… (Noam Chomsky, Aspects)⁶⁸

Expressions like ‘observe’ and ‘natural’ are incongruous for an approach declaring that ‘knowledge of the language, like most facts of interest and importance, is neither presented for direct observation nor extractable from data by inductive procedures of any known sort’.⁶⁹ Anyway, the ‘rules’ are precisely not observable, and even the original sentence is hardly natural. None of the 295 occurrences of ‘sincerity’ in the British National Corpus appears at the start of a sentence; and precious few are Subjects of an Active Verb with a Direct Object, such as:

[47] Butler’s earnest sincerity made him a popular hero and leader, especially among the oil-field workers (Campaign for the Preservation of Rural Wales)^BNC

Moreover ‘sincerity’ in the BNC data nearly always relates to active agents like the Trinidadian workers’ rights advocate Tubal Uriah Butler in[47]. The ‘deviant’ versions (i-iii) don’t support an ‘explication’ of ‘grammar’ because, whatever their status in any theory, they are equally gibberish in practice. And a linguistics that formulates a ‘hierarchy’ to rank gibberish is like a meteorology that ranks the ‘deviance’ of windless hurricanes, parched cloudbursts, and sizzling snowstorms.

79. Among the largest claims, advanced with no data, was that ‘Syntax’ or ‘Grammar’ — the two terms evasively used interchangeably — is ‘autonomous’ and ‘independent of meaning’.⁷⁰ This claim handily promised to suspend, at a stroke, the tough problems of accounting for meaning, such as those I pointed out in descriptive Morphology and Semantics (II.54ff, 70ff). A transformational grammar⁷¹ would only present a set of ‘rules’ for ‘transforming’ any one sentence structure into another, prospectively without changing its meaning. The paraded example was the ‘passive transformation’, which ‘transforms’ a riveting sentence like ‘the man hit the ball’ into ‘the ball was hit by the man’ (but cf. II.126).

80. In such a ‘grammar’ ‘describing the structure’ of any given sentence equals using ‘rules’ that fit it into the total set of ‘well-formed sentence structures’ in a ‘language’. In contrast to the distinct correspondences between theoretical and practical units in Phonology and Morphology (II.45, 49), the ‘sentence’ evidently doubles interchangeably in both roles (II.68), although the artificiality of invented data camouflages this practice. In theory, a modest set of rules should apply to the total set via ‘transformations’ from a minimal set of maximally simple structures sometimes called ‘kernels’⁷² — perhaps vaguely inspired by the minimal Phonemes and Morphemes of descriptive linguistics? In practice, generative linguists would work out the set of rules and confirm their applicability.

81. But this practical work must have seemed unattractive, and, as far as I can discover, was never achieved for any language. Moreover, few generative linguists seem to be seriously pursuing it nowadays. Instead, many are pursuing luxuriant elaborations on the theoretical side. The practical but untenable claims were quietly shelved that Syntax is independent of meaning, and that all sentences are ‘transformed’ from a base of ‘kernels’. A more encompassing scheme was pro-posed under fresh labels, having a base with a ‘deep structure’, and any actual sentence with a ‘surface structure’. The ‘deep structure’ gets ‘generated’ and then ‘submitted to the semantic component for semantic interpretation’, whilst the ‘sur-face structure enters the phonological component’ for ‘phonetic interpretation’.⁷³  Morphology simply didn’t appear. Later on, a ‘pragmatic interpretation’ was also postulated,⁷⁴ but was not integrated into official generative theory, doubtless because pragmatics deals with language use (II.72).

82. And precisely language use had been set aside by another large claim, namely that ‘linguistic theory’ in general and a ‘generative grammar’ in particular should describe ‘competence, the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language’, in a programmatic dichotomy with ‘performance, the actual use of language in concrete situations’; ‘only under the idealization’ of the ‘speaker-hearer’ ‘is performance a direct reflection of competence’, but not ‘in actual fact’.⁷⁵ Moreover, this ‘com-petence was attributed to an ‘ideal speaker-hearer  in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly’.⁷⁵ ‘The study of competence abstracts away from the whole question’ of ‘why speakers say what they say, how language is used in various social groups, how it is used in communication’.⁷⁶ These claims expediently dismissed all the problems of language variation due to such factors as social class, education, and culture; and culminated in the trenchant claim that the ‘observed use of language’ ‘surely cannot constitute the subject-matter of linguistics’ as a ‘serious discipline’.⁷⁵ We might well recall the early pronouncement that ‘speech is a ‘heterogeneous mass’ of ‘accessory and accidental facts’ (II.40). Overtones of hopeless utopia resound again, when we are told that ‘from the point of view of the theory’, ‘much of the actual speech observed consists of fragments and deviant expressions’.⁷⁷

83. Such claims might further imply that young children, who are exposed only to ‘performance’ and ‘observed use’, should encounter severe problems in learning their ‘language’, which they don’t. So the ‘grammar’ was also claimed to represent a ‘genetic’ capacity of human beings, whereby a ‘language’ is ‘acquired’ through an ‘innate language acquisition device’ programmed to select the ‘grammar’ of the native language from a ‘universal grammar’.⁷⁸ As evidence, the straightforward fact was adduced that young children acquire their native language without being expressly taught, and can soon produce and understand many sentences they have never heard or seen. But this fact does not prove that children acquire their language by unconsciously filtering down from a ‘universal grammar’ of ‘deep structures’. Far more plausibly, they acquire it from experiencing a great deal of text and discourse in meaningful situations that display the creative openness of the language. The ‘acquisition device’ papered over the patent unlearnability of the types of ‘grammar’ (or ‘syntax’) that generative linguistics has consistently pro-pounded; one idealisation was devised to salvage another.

84. Whether the concept of ‘ linguistic universals’⁷⁹ can be linked to substantive evidence might depend on which aspects of language are addressed. Doing so would be easiest for ‘phonological universals’ reflecting the construction of the human vocal apparatus, than for ‘semantic universals’ invoked as a presumptive basis for semantic units and features (cf. II.71). An ecologist approach would postulate a dialectic between universality and diversity in linguistic, cognitive, and social evolution. Universality would rest more on theory, and diversity more on practice; cognitive and social parallels can favour linguistic parallels, but easily may not, as any sensitive learner of a foreign language can confirm.

85. All in all, generative studies have emphatically reversed the realism and behaviourism instated by descriptive studies, and promoted a radical idealism and mentalism. By now theory (language) has run much further away from practice (discourse) than in the early dichotomy of ‘langue’ and ‘parole’, yet the key problem is the same: the practices of the linguists themselves are left in a vacuum, enjoined to ‘study language’ but not ‘actual speech’ — to produce a theory without observing the practices, and to create theory-driven, top-down input without recourse to data-driven, bottom-up input (cf. I.84) — like a science providing explanations of its own abstractions (II.40). We cannot look for data from an ‘ideal speaker-hearer’  or a ‘completely homogeneous speech-community’, since neither can ever exist. In effect, a ‘theory of language’ in the generative sense is immune to refutation (cf. II.33).⁸⁰ ‘Language’ is defined a priori to be just what the theory states it is, no matter what masses of the evidence indicate it is.

86. These waves of idealisation are utterly unlike the idealisations of prescriptivism and purism. A generative grammar aspires to describe ‘competence’, whose ‘rules are ‘unconsciously’ and ‘automatically’ applied; a sample is ‘ungrammatical’ if its structure cannot be described. A prescriptive grammar aspires to intervene in performance, and with ‘rules’ that need to be applied with conscious effort; sam-ples are ‘ungrammatical’ if some language guardian objects to them.

87. Nonetheless, dismissing the ‘observed use of language’ as the ‘subject-matter of linguistics’ (II.82) makes the generativists resemble the prescriptivists in offering their own variety of the language as the sole model (II.18), which they access by ‘intuition’ and ‘introspection’. Indeed, the offer is far more radical when the linguists represent both the ‘ideal speaker-hearer’  who ‘knows the language perfectly’, and the entire ‘speech-community’ if the latter is indeed ‘completely homogeneous’ (cf. II.82, 85, 116, 144).

88. Matters were aggravated by the generativist reservation that speakers are not ‘aware of the rules’, nor even able to ‘become aware’ of them, nor are their ‘statements about their intuitive knowledge’ ‘necessarily accurate’; ‘any interesting generative grammar will be dealing, for the most part, with mental processes’ ‘far beyond the level of actual or even potential consciousness’.⁸¹ This reservation should logically weaken the reports given by generative linguists making ‘state-ments’ or presenting ‘rules’. Otherwise, they would need superhuman powers of introspection, apparently conferred by academic degree in linguistics (cf. II.145 ).

89. Taken together, these theoretical and practical moves characterise generativism as an updated pre-modern project closer to idealism than to formal logic. Over the years, theories have traversed a bewildering gallery of technical transmutations with portentous names, leading to a ‘minimalist program’⁸² that defiantly advertises doing as little possible. Obviously, such an approach offers no substance or support for the ecologist agenda advocated in this book, such as social or educational applications; and we are bluntly told that ‘your professional training as a linguist’ ‘just doesn’t help you to be useful to other people’.⁸³  

II.E. Functional studies of language  

90. Functionalism⁸⁴ can designate an approach for describing how a language ‘functions’ in a broad sense. A ‘language’ can be defined as a system of related choices that helps determine each other’s probabilities of being selected or com-bined in discourse. (Here too, among various definitions of the term, this one seems dominant.) Ideologically, functionalism resonates with realism, but not with physicalism or unified science. Historically, it is allied with philology in its Eastern European approach (II.104) and with ethnography in its British (and later Australian) approach (II.108). The two approaches have shared some principal concepts but were long hindered in active co-operation by the spiteful politics of the Cold War. In contrast, the approaches summarised in II.C and II.D were more concentrated on the continent of Western Europe and in the United States.

91. To clarify the wider context for functionalism in language study, I turn to a long-standing contrast between two ideologies I have reserved for the discussion. The ideology of formalism⁸⁵ holds that any complex phenomenon is best described in terms of its forms. Formalism is a key ideology of power, e.g., in encouraging bureaucracy, the law, and education to impose gratuitous formality upon action and discourse (I.54, 59; VI.31; VII.8). Racism and sexism are formalist too in discrim-nating against humans by their facial and bodily shapes (cf. VII.D). 

92. Formalism also pervades modern linguistics: Phonemes and Morphemes correspond to forms in transcribed sequences of speech; Phrases and Sentences are treated as ‘formal strings’ or converted into alternative ‘formalisations’ (e.g. ‘deep structures’, ‘parse trees’). Moreover, linguists periodically expropriate from mathe-matics and formal logic, whose ‘formality’ and ‘rigour’ foreshadow a welcome respite from the luxuriant complexities of human language.

93. The major problem in applying formalism to language study lies in the ‘sparseness’. ‘Formalizing’ language data and devising ‘formal rules’ or ‘features’ is not so much an explanation as a reduction and rarefaction. Once a formal model has been adopted, its minor formal resemblances to a real language like English are exploited, whilst its major functional disparities are disregarded. So the practices of formalist analysis centre on resolutely replacing one set of forms (e.g. sentence structures) with another set of forms (e.g. phrase markers), whilst discounting most real functions. ‘Transformational grammar’ does virtually nothing else (II.79).

94. A ‘formalist analysis’ of meaning seems pointedly ironic, given the ancient and basic opposition between form and meaning, which are related as the means and the ends (cf. II.50). To paper over the irony, a standard practice in ‘formal analysis’ is to insert unanalysed English expressions into some formalism, e.g., as ‘semantic features’ with plus or minus signs [48], or as bracketed values for sets[49] (M = world model, g = value assignment in lambda calculus).

[48] bachelor : + adult  + human  + male  – married^www

[49] The interpretation of a verb phrase is a characteristic set, e.g., we could define a world in which john smokes but mary doesn’t with I(“smokes”= {ájohn, 1ñ, ámary, 0ñ}.^www

[48] represents an ostensibly orderly and tractable meaning of the sort that feature analysis prefers, e.g., kinship terms, animal taxonomies, and colour names. We could just as well set up a whimsical though nicely balanced taxonomy of Bangladeshi husbands for sample[38] in II.71, where the ‘revolting’ ones come in two species, resembling either a ‘banana tree’[38a] or a ‘coconut tree’[38b].

[38a] husband ^{banana tree} :+ half human + revolting + short + squat   + glabrous + green-skinned

[38b] husband ^{coconut tree}:+ half human + revolting + tall   + slender + hairy       + brown-skinned

Besides, as I remarked, ‘human’ is not a feature, but another Word with its own meaning, whilst ‘bachelor’ is a social construct and might even be ‘+ married’[50] (II.71).[49] ‘defines’ a strange ‘world’ indeed, populated by just two people, one of them doing just ‘one’ activity, and the other doing ‘zero’; don’t bother asking how they get seated in restaurants or travel in trains. In real data, the distribution of activities might be a much more meaningful demonstration of ‘philosophy’[51].

[50] There are men whom a merciful Providence has undoubtedly ordained to a single life, but who[…] have flown in the face of its decrees. There is no object more deserving of pity than the married bachelor. Of such was Captain Nichols. (Moon and Sixpence)

[51] She screams very loud, and falls into hysterics: and he smokes wery comfor-tably ‘till she comes to agin. That’s philosophy, sir, ain’t it? (Pickwick)

At least we know why and how Tony ‘Veller’ smoked, and why his good lady did zero, passed out on the floor.

95. The converse ideology of functionalism holds that a complex phenomenon is best described in terms of its functions. In various disciplines, functionalism has served in relating reality (including the body) to mind in philosophy;⁸⁶ machine architecture to information processing in the theory of computation;⁸⁷ social struc-ture to social organisation in social anthropology;⁸⁸ physiological or cultural needs to institutions in ethnography;⁸⁹ curriculum to  society in education;⁹⁰ and national to international policies in political science.⁹¹

96. In linguistics, functionalism has been impeded by some contrary principles: the dichotomy between language and discourse; the isolation of ‘language by itself’ from cognition and society; the sterile quest for ‘abstractness’ and ‘universality’; the subdivision of language into ‘levels’ or ‘components’; the sentence as the largest unity of study; and so forth. The preferred languages of functionalist study seem to have relatively flexible word-order or word-shape, such as Czech or Chinese.

97. The major problem in applying functionalism to language study lies in the ‘richness’ unconfined by data so exuberant you hardly know where to start or stop. Functionalism can engage with the vast variety and subtlety inhering in the relations between forms (which are usually manifested in the data) and functions (which must usually be inferred). And far more than forms, functions resist isolated, exhaustive treatment; they typically interact or interlock, so that choices tend to be made in groups, and the ‘functionality’ pertains to the group as a whole (cf. II.153ff). Functional explanations must therefore rely on plausible inferences, not logical proofs. But in return, plausibility can be enhanced by testing against the evidence in very large corpora of authentic data, rather than against the handfuls of invented data adduced by formalism (cf. I.33; II.19, 29, 31, 71, 73, 78, 103, 126).

98. As a further problem, the ‘functionality of forms’ can be guided by historical and social evolutions for which little conclusive evidence is at hand. At present, for example, Western European languages typically have distinctive forms for the Familiar and Polite Address. The oldest attested pattern I know of was the contrast between the Second Person Singular and Plural, the latter being the Polite form for a single addressee (e.g. English ‘thou, you’, German ‘du, Ihr’, French ‘tu, vous’, Spanish ‘tu, vosotros’, Italian ‘tu, voi’, Portuguese ‘tu, vós’), possibly with honor-ific elaborations:

[52] if I were as tedious as a  king, I could find in my heart to bestow it all on your wor-hip (Much Ado about Nothing)

[53] Er scheint mir, mit Verlaub von euer Gnaden, wie eine der langbeinigen Zikaden (Faust)

[54] Monseigneur, je vais chercher la mitre, si Votre Grandeur le permet. (Le Rouge et le Noir)

[55] Dios haga a vuestra merced muy venturoso caballero y le dé ventura en lides. (Don Quixote)

[56] Buona notte a vostra signoria! (La Bohème)

[57] Beijo com humildade a santíssima mão de Vossa Excelência Reverendíssima, senhor bispo. (Rio de Janeiro no tempo dos vice-reis) ^WWW

But this old pattern has not remained stable. English has largely dropped it, whereas Italian, Spanish, and German have introduced Third Person forms for the Polite, Italian and Spanish distinguishing Singular and Plural (‘lei, loro’, ‘Usted, Ustedes’), and German using only Plural forms for everybody (‘Sie’) after dropping the Familiar Singular ‘Er’ and ‘Sie’ used especially for social inferiors. Most varieties of Brazilian Portuguese have disavowed their European ancestry by dropping the entire Second Person and substituting the Third for both Familiar (‘você, vocês’ ironically contracted from the honorific ‘Vossa(s) Mercê(s)’) and Polite (‘o/a Senhor/a, os/as Senhores/as’).

99. A functional explanation for these evolving forms would point to the social motives for distinguishing friends or family from strangers or persons of respect. But we can hardly hope for proof of why and how these specific forms were adopted and successfully disseminated despite the multitude of affected usages; yet neither should we invoke the ‘arbitrariness’ brandished by formalism to foreclose questions about relating function to form (cf. II.41). As a plausible hypothesis, some rising urban power group wished to influence social relations through alternative ‘forms of address’ and commanded the resources to disseminate them, whereas the older forms might persist much longer in rural or isolated communities; but testing the hypothesis would require very large data samples from the transition periods. An interesting counter-drift in Brazilian Portuguese is the hybrid usage of the old Second Person Pronoun ‘tu’ with the current Third Person Verb-forms borrowed from ‘você’:

[58] Tu vai ser grande, mo fio. Tu vai ser uma espécie de orixá. (Por Mares Nunca Dantes)⁹²

Language guardians denounce the hybrid with great fury and little effect, since this form has valid social functions, such as signalling close solidarity.

100. Whether or not we can marshal conclusive evidence, functionalism asserts that the functions drive the evolution and operation of a language, and that relevant functions motivate suitable linguistic forms, along with communicative resources such as intonation, facial expressions, gestures, and so forth (Chs. IV-V). Lord knows, the single Pronoun ‘you’ in no way indicates that speakers in England are not conscious of social distinctions between ‘superiors’ and ‘inferiors’. They get the message across well enough, and without edifying tomes like the one entitled

[59] The friendly instructer, or, A companion for young masters and misses: in which their duty to God and their parents, and their carriage to superiors and inferiors, are recommended in plain and familiar dialogues. (1814)

But in early 19^th century, the rising bourgeoisie was evidently (and understandably) insecure about watching their language and usage in a changing society.

101. As yet another problem, the forms in actual discourse tend to be multi-functional, such that the functions can radiate some overlap or indecision that reverberates into our description. These BNC data ([60][63-64] from recorded conversations) show the Interjection ‘oy’, now in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

[60] Tim: Oy mum. Do you want a straw mum? Dorothy: Would you not shout at me. Tim: What?  Dorothy: Don’t shout at me. Tim: Do you want a straw please?

[61] her reactions momentarily startled me[…] as she hollered, ‘Oy, Richard!’ at the top of her voice across the car-park. (Hospital Circles)

[62] From the constable came a shout of, ‘Oy, you, stop that!’ (Season Murder)

[63] Richard: That’s the one I put on, oy! Oy! Ah! Jonathan: Oy! Helen: ah ah,[laughter] he can’t put them on him properly!

[64] There’s three large windows in it, and a door. And erm the roof is this erm stuff it’s just like er plastic moulding. But it’s double glazed. Bloody oven in there! Oy oy oy oy!

As a Word-Class, most Interjections are purely functional, as for getting attention[60], hailing an old friend[61], warning a hooligan[62], reacting to difficulties[63], or lamenting distress[64]. Other people may be ‘startled’ by a quiet aunt yelling[61], or amused by the failure of Richard (age 2) to get his gloves on[63]. The stern rebuke of ‘mum’ Dorothy in[60] led Tim (age 3) to quiet down and add the ‘please’ which mums love to hear but which sounds odd for an offer instead of a request. 

102. These problems and data point up a characteristic effect of functionalism: raising linguistic issues steadily expands into social and cognitive issues. Such is a natural reflex, since discourse communication and interaction, like most human activities, are linguistic, social, and cognitive (I.48ff, 61). Even a large set of linguistic data like the BNC at 100 million words keeps delivering fresh questions along with its answers. The interjection ‘oy’ occurs some 80 times in the BNC, and we must gather and sort the functions from the rich contexts. No doubt other functions don’t happen to occur in the data base, especially if we also look at, say, Australian English. Our conclusions must be reserved and provisional, always open to review from fresh data. Meanwhile, we can seek clues that the Participants hold similar notions about the uses of ‘oy’.

103. Authorities widely concede that constructive interaction between the ideol-ogies of formalism and functionalism has been rare in the past; the prospects for reconciling them are periodically aired,⁹³ but seem doubtful to me. The two diverge sharply on substantive issues, and in discursive style. Formalism has been more trendy, ranking theoretical innovations over practical progress and adducing small quantities of invented data, whilst functionalism has been mainly consistent, retaining its theoretical frameworks to extend practical progress and consulting large quantities of authentic data. And the most noted of all formalists has, in print, harshly belittled more functionalist academics and scientists — accusing us of ‘theoretical pretentions’ ‘no intellectual depth’, ‘no sophistication’, ‘careerism’, and ‘very poor moral judgement’; our work is ‘banal’, ‘puerile’, ‘dogmatic’, ‘reactionary’, ‘obscure’, ‘of marginal human significance’, and ‘hardly worth discussing’; and we are like ‘low-level clericals’ and ‘collectors of butterflies’.^`94 This is not the discourse of reconciliation, but the flakspeak of confrontation.

104. The Eastern European approach to functionalism, sometimes called the Prague School after its main regional centre,^`95 was developed by linguists whose native languages (e.g. Czech, Slovak, Russian) are more overtly functional than formal in their organisation (cf. II.97). Since word shapes are more distinctive (e.g., Nouns with Case Endings), word order can be more flexible than in Western European languages favoured by formalism; and no free-standing ‘standard sen-tence form’ can be set up as a norm in the manner of the English ‘Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase’. Instead, word order conforms to degrees of ‘knownness’ and ‘focus’. Sample[65] implies that meeting Charles is known, and the Location deserves focus;[65a] treats Wenceslas Square as the famous Location it is in Prague (National Museum, monument of Jan Hus, etc.) and focuses on whom I met there.

[65] Ja jsem potkal Karla   na Václavském náměstí.⁹⁶

       I   past met     Charles at Wenceslas   Square

[65a] Ja jsem potkal na Václavském náměstí Karla

        I  past met     at  Wenceslas   Square  Charles

By describing this flexibility, the ‘Prague School’ approach has acquired the designation functional sentence perspective,⁹⁷ though (again unlike formalism) the approach is by no means limited to the isolated sentence. Czech sentences are rather constructed within a ‘functional context perspective’.

105. ‘Prague school’ functionalism has been descriptive in predominantly comparative and historical modes,⁹⁸ probing the organisation of a language at one stage by comparing and contrasting it with another stage or with another nearby. This approach was happy to utilize the results of philology, rejecting the dichoto-mies between ‘synchronic’ versus ‘diachronic’ and ‘langue’ versus ‘parole’,⁹⁹ along with the formalist treatment of each language as a closed system.

106. The following explanation may characterise the procedures of the Prague School approach in the discourse of its founder:

[66] English can be said to have the accusative object in many instances where Czech and German have the dative (compare[…] pomáhat někomu’, ‘jemandem helfen’, with ‘to help sombody’). How can this widespread use of the accusative be accounted for?[…] When French verbs were taken over into English, they preserved their constructions, which often contained the accusative and thus differed from the older Germanic constructions.[…] English took over the French verbs ‘aider quelqu’un’[and now has] ‘to aid somebody’.[Or,] the predominance of the accusative object may have been due to the tendency to express the syntactic relation by mere juxtaposition. (Vilém Mathesius, Functional Analysis)¹⁰⁰

The forms that function as Objects of a Verb in ‘present-day English’ are examined in relation to historical change.  Formalism would merely incorporate the dative or accusative into the notation as arbitrary in both form and position.

107. The comparative approach naturally noticed that ‘functional sentence perspective’ affects languages in differing ways, in accord with the factor of communicative dynamism,¹⁰¹ i.e., the degree of interest and informativity of sen-tence elements. The logical strategy puts the Theme with lower dynamism early and then places the Rheme¹⁰² with the higher dynamism later on, just as you would set the stage before bringing on the main characters. But this strategy is less pervasive in English, French, and German than in Czech and Slovak, as illustrated by parallel passages from the Book of Luke (2:8-9) in the New Testament:¹⁰³

[67a] And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them

[67b] Or il y avait dans la même contrée des bergers, qui couchaient dans les champs et gardaient leurs troupeaux pendant les veilles de la nuit. Un ange du Seigneur se présenta á eux; la gloire du Seigneur resplendit autour d’eux

[67c] In der Gegend dort hielten sich Hirten auf. Sie waren in der Nacht auf dem Feld und bewachteten ihre Herde. Da kam ein Engel des Herrn zu ihnen und die Herrlichkeit des Herrn umstrahlte sie

[67d] V té krajině nocovali pod širým nebem pastýři a střídali se na hlídce u svého stáda. Najednou u nich stál anděl Páně a sláva Páně se kolem nich rozzářila

[67e] V tom istom kraji boli pastieri, ktorí v noch bdeli a strážkili svoje stádo. Tu zastal pri nich Pánoj anjel a ožiarila ich Pánova sláva

In all five versions, the first Clause opens by specifying the Place (in the same country), which had been recently mentioned (‘Joseph went up from Galilee into Judaea’, 2:4), and reserves the position of high dynamism for the shepherds, who are being mentioned for the first time in the Book of Luke (and, in a literal rather than figural sense, for the first time in the New Testament). Their activity of  ‘keeping watch over their flock by night’ being highly predictable, can be relegated to a Participial Modifier (English) or a Relative Clause (French). The English and French[67a-b] place both the ‘angel’ and the ‘glory’ at the very start of their Clauses; the German does the same except for the brief obligatory displacement with initial ‘da’ followed by Verb, then Subject. The Clauses end with Pronouns of low dynamism (‘them, eux, ihnen – sie’). The Definite Article in the English text (‘the angel’) might suggest this is the same angel Gabriel who announced the miracle to Mary (Luke 1:26-38), but the French and German texts (as well as a modern English text I consulted) all have the Indefinite Article. Czech and Slovak use no Articles at all, but positioning the angel (‘anděl, anjel’) near the end of the Clauses could signal the same function of Indefiniteness as well as high dynamism. The Slovak version[67e] gets the angel the latest after the Lord (‘Pánoj anjel’ versus Czech ‘anděl Páně’), and is the only version to put the glory (‘sláva’) at the very end of the next Clause, thus being more attentive to dynamism than[67d]. The parallel effect would be marked in English, though not at all odd:

[67f] And, lo, there came upon them the angel of the Lord, and round about them shone the glory of the Lord.

To my ear, this yields a more impressive cadence by exploiting the strategy of End Weight, which I shall discuss in relation to Prosody (IV.15-19).

108. The British approach to functionalism, whose regional centre has since expanded to Australia, has often been called systemic functional linguistics,¹⁰⁴ seeking to describe the organisation of a language as a network of interrelated choices.¹⁰⁵ These linguists too have rejected the stodgy dichotomies of the formalists, not just between ‘langue and parole’,¹⁰⁶ but between grammar (not ‘syntax’) and lexicon as constituents of the lexicogrammar¹⁰⁷ (Ch. III). Moreover, they situated the text as a system at the centre of their work.¹⁰⁸

109. To illustrate the procedures of the British approach, I cite a sample text[68], and a well-known discourse analysis by the founder[69].

[68] The bushes twitched again[...] The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle[...] The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. ‘Clop!’ His ear twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig. (William Golding, The Inheritors)

[69] The picture is one in which people act, but do not act on things; they move only themselves, not other objects.[…] The syntactic tension expresses this combination of activity and helplessness[in a] reluctance to envisage the ‘whole man’ participating in a process.[…] The transitivity patterns are the reflection of[…] the inherent limitations of understanding, whether cultural or biological, of Lok and his people, and their consequent inability to survive when confronted with beings at a higher stage of devel-opment. (M.A.K Halliday, Explorations)¹⁰⁹

Thus, when the Neanderthal Lok watches a person from a more advanced tribe shooting an arrow at him, the event is expressed as a series of natural processes performed by a ‘stick’ and a ‘twig’. These choices deliberately omit the connection between ‘stick’ and ‘twig’ in a single weapon of bow and arrow, plus the causes and effects involved, e.g., bending and releasing the bow, seen head-on as a stick ‘growing shorter at both ends’ and then ‘shooting out to full length’. Lok’s perception of a ‘dead tree’ suddenly ‘acquiring a voice’ and ‘growing a twig’ projects the Neanderthals’ archaic and mystified world-view, dooming them to a destruction they can neither understand nor resist.

110. Even these terse sketches might indicate how the two approaches to functionalism have surpassed formalism in coordinating theory and practice. The functional analysis in[68] of sample[69] again points up the widening from linguistic into cognitive and social issues (II.104), noticing how the lexicogrammar can mirror a conflict between two whole societies at the dawn of human history, foreshadowing the domination of one society by another with more advanced weapons technology. Such analyses hold considerable potential for an ecologist agenda to deepen the relations between theory and practice not merely in linguistic domains but in cognitive and social domains as well.

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