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Functions of Language 1/2, 1994, 163-200.

Function and Form in Language Theory and Research:The Tide is Turning

Robert de Beaugrande

Actor sent to jail for not finishing sentence

Knoxville, TN New Sentinel , 1/21/89

ABSTRACT

It is argued that many of the major notions in mainstream linguistic theory andmethod over the years have been influenced by a classical formalist ambience thatsuited conventional ideas about how science ought to proceed but fostered anidealized frozen conception of the language system in isolation form reality andsociety. Today, the tide is turning toward functionalist accounts of language; but theaccompanying shift in our scientific programme calls for careful reflection. Somedeep-lying motives for the shift are explored with a view to potential consequences.

A. The quest for language by itself

1. Two basic facts about language seem fairly plain. One fact is thatlanguage hasa high degree of organization reflected in the front end presented to our perception the sounds and forms of words and phrases. The other fact is thatpeople use language todo things to mean things and to achieve things. Within the big picture of languageadopted by speakers and hearers in everyday life, these two facts seldom compete or conflict. Yet the study of language has often sought to chooseeither the one factor theother either how language by itself is organizedor what people use language to do. If you face such a decision, the first choice may well look more appealing in promising asmaller, tidier job. Instead of confronting what J.R. Firth (1957a: 187) was pleased to call,after Alfred North Whitehead, the mush of general goings on, we can focus on theorganization of language and divide up the labour of our studies, one person or groupstudying the sounds, another the words, another the phrases, and so on. Once all these itemshave been found and classified, our job should be finished.

2. Given such an appeal, it is hardly surprising if the majority of study so far, rangingfrom traditional grammar up through philology and modern linguistics, has been devotedto language by itself. When Saussures influential Course in General Linguistics


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emphatically concluded with the fundamental idea that the true and unique object of linguistics is language studied in and for itself (1969 [1916]: 232), he (or his students) presumably intended to shield linguistics from absorption by neighboring sciences.Saussure complained that heretofore language has almost always been studied inconnection with something else (1969: 16). Though surrounded by other sciences that

sometimes borrow from its data, sometimes supply it with data political history,psychology, anthropology, sociology, ethnography, prehistory, and palaeontology linguistics must be carefully distinguished from such sciences, which can contributeonly to external linguistics, concerning everything that is outside the system of language; in return, we can draw no accurate conclusions outside the domain of linguistics proper (1969: 102f, 147, 6, 9, 224, 20f, 228) (but see 43).

3. In effect, the prospects for any science of language were made contingent on the precept that language by itself can indeed be located and studied, given the proper methods. This precept was in turn reflected in several tenets propounded in influential books setting down the classical programme of mainstream linguistics:1

(1) A language should be considered auniform, stable, and abstract system in asinglestage of its evolution .

(2) This system is to bedefined by internal, language-based criteria .(3) Language is aphenomenon distinct from other domains of human knowledge or

activity .(4) A language should be describedapart from variations due to time, place, or

identity of speakers .(5) The description of a language should be couched in statements at ahigh degree of generality , if possible about the language as a whole or even about all languages.

Within that programme, the tenets interlock in projecting a free-standing and self-sufficientconception of language that stands firm while we are describing it (cf. 26, 65).

4. Most of the theoretical and practical problems throughout modern linguistics havearisen from the tendency to consider tenets (1-5) asfundamental postulates which anyscience of language must accept rather than asempirical hypotheses to be tested by a range

of methods. Linguistics was rendered highly self-conscious about the hypothetical buthenceforth essential borderline between linguistic versus extra-linguistic or non-linguistic data, issues, explanations, and so on (cf. 30, 63). Since language by itself isnot a fact or object directly presented to observation, linguistics sought toconstruct it by sheer theoretical bootstrapping. The most fateful consequence has been the idea thatlanguage can beremoved from all contexts for purposes of rigorous analysis; in fact, suchanalysis merelycreates a different and special context , one that may exert powerful butlargely unacknowledged controls on the language data (cf. 40, 54).

5. Let us focus here on hypothesis (1) stating that language should be considered auniform, stable, and abstract system, which can be called for short theu-s-a

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hypothesis (though it was by no means limited to or universally accepted in the real USA).The strongest test for this hypothesis would be whether linguistic research does indeeddiscover such a u-s-a system for a given natural language like English. The discovery process has proceeded by means of conventionaldata-handling strategies , such as:

(1) collating : a large set of data samples are compared and contrasted to distill out whatthey have in common, e.g. which word types frequently occur with other types;

(2)generalizing : certain aspects of the observed data are construed to be general ones,e.g. that the Subject-Verb-Object order of a sample set of English sentences is atypical pattern for the language as a whole;

(3) rarefying : the rich data are rendered more sparse by disregarding certain aspectsor details, e.g. variations in the actual pronunciation of language sounds;

(4)decontextualizing : the data are taken out of the observed context and treated as if they had occurred in isolation or could occur in a wide range of contexts, e.g.

irrespective of the social status of groups or speakers;(5) introspecting : the linguists make estimations based on their own intuitions about the

language, e.g. which sentences do or do not violate the rules;(6) consulting informants : native speakers are and asked to judge or rate data samples

of their language, e.g. to decide whether two utterances mean the same.

Since the data by themselves do not tell us exactly how these strategies should be applied,the validity of the strategies ought to be a further hypothesis, or rather a set of hypotheses,to be tested by our results.

6. But how can the results provide a test for the validity of the very strategies expresslydeployed to produce those results? To escape circularity, the key tests would surely betheconvergence among data discovered and described, and theconsensus among linguistsabout how the data should be treated and interpreted. In retrospect, these two tests have been met with full success only in the description of language sounds in phonology. Here,linguistics indeed found a u-s-a system of phonemes whose quantity and nature can be precisely described by two sets of criteria. Physically, each phoneme can be uniquelydescribed by its features, e.g., a voiced stop such as [d] produced when the vocal cords

vibrate and the air flow is fully blocked; the visual correspondence between phonemes andwritten letters of the Roman alphabet was also supportive, though it was not an official base because the description was strictly addressed to spoken language. Mentally, eachphoneme must be capable of differentiating between units that also differ in meaning, e.g.[d] versus [t] in hid versus hit. This full success made the study of language soundsystems in phonemics or phonology into the model paradigm in modern linguistics,e.g. when Firth (1957a [1951]: 222; 1968 [1957b]: 191) recommended that phonemicdescription should serve primarily as a basis for the statement of grammatical and lexicalfacts, and that linguistic analysis should have the same rigorous control of formalcategories as in all phonological analysis. A lasting heritage of this view has been the

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proliferation of -eme terms (e.g. morpheme, lexeme, tagmeme, syntagmeme,sememe) modeled after the phoneme.

7. Henceforth, mainstream theories confidently projected language to be an array of u-s-a subsystems (usually called levels), each consisting of arepertory of minimalcombinable elements comparable to phonemes. Acomplete description of a language

would be the sum of the descriptions for each subsystem, supplied by linguists working inthe several areas within a neat division of labour. For a time, some linguists (especially inAmerica) insisted that rigid, water-tight compartments or levels are aesthetically satisfyingand provide the only valid scientific conclusions, and that level mixing was a sin, e.g.the Pike heresy of persistently using non-phonetic criteria in phonemics (quoted by Pike1967: 59, 443, 66, 362; cf. Hockett 1942, 1955; Moulton 1947; Voegelin 1949:78; W.Smith 1950: 8; Trager & H. Smith 1951).

8. Yet matters have proven less manageable as research has moved beyond thesubsystem of sounds. The subsystem of minimal meaningful forms, called morphemes, isalready less tidy. Convergence and consensus are fairly highfor identifying and isolating the morphemes in our data, where the chief physical criterion,the linear arrangement of the data written down, is visually clear though less well-definedthan the articulatory criteria of phonology. But convergence and consensus are rather lower for classifying morphemes into categories, since observed linear positions by themselves donot afford explicit, clean-cut indications of category; at most, we can set up some categorieswhose names indicate where items appear, e.g. prefixes in front, suffixes behind, andinfixes in the middle. Some languages do present specific morphemic sectors, such as theinflections of Nouns and Verbs, which can be precisely and exhaustively described; yeteven there, complexities can arise, e.g., the category of English Noun plural morphemeswritten -s or -es but pronounced /s/, /z/, /s/, or /z/2 , plus the zero morpheme notwritten at all (like sheep). Otherwise, the majority of morphemes fall into very large andfuzzy sets, e.g., all Nouns or all Verbs. The standard solution to this problem has been to put all indivisible words over into the class of lexemes and reserve the term morphemesfor the tidier sectors.

9. The subsystem of syntax, which concerns the arrangement of phrases and clauses, is

still more problematic, chiefly because we are dealing with a repertory consisting notof minimal units but of complex units (sometimes called syntagmemes after the termsphonemes and morphemes) ranging from just one morpheme (e.g. help!) up to anextensive phrase, clause, or sentence. Nor does it seem feasible to give an exhaustive, precise listing of phrases or clauses; even the traditional division into Subject andPredicate can leave tricky residues, e.g., signals of the speakers viewpoint like frankly.And syntax inherits the problems of morphology about classifying items in sets. Again, the physical appearance of data written down for visual inspection does a deal of handiwork

insofar as the divisions between words and between at least some phrases seem evident. Butthe reasons why an observed pattern of words and phrases has that shape must beinferred .

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10. Evidently, the methods of identifying and classifying units into repertories hadsupported consensus among linguists quite well for phonology and fairly well for morphology, but later much less well for syntax. So amid a flood of animated controversy, phonology plus morphology were moved toward the sidelines and syntax assumed the roleof model paradigm in linguistics. True, the u-s-a hypothesis remained firmly in place;

but the u-s-a system was now conceived to be a repertory of rules for arranging unitsinto phrases and sentences . Yet since unlike the units these rules plainly do notappear in the data, this new paradigm placed increasing demands on the ingenuity of linguists in devising rules. The data-handling strategy (5) of introspecting now assumeda key dual role not just in relating the rules to discovered data but in generating inventeddata that would reflect the linguists knowledge of the rules as native speakers their competence (cf. 46). In this dual and somewhat circular role, introspecting threatened toovershadow the other data-handling strategies, especially the strategies of collatingsamples and consulting informants.

11. The state of affairs was most diffuse in semantics, the investigation of the meaningsof language. While phonology was the model paradigm, semantics had sought to set up arepertory of abstract minimal units called semes or sememes like the phonemes, e.g. Animate or Human, but the criteria for identifying them lacked any straightforward basis such as the phonemes had (cf. 6, 19ff). When syntax became the model paradigm,semantics was handed the job of supplying rules to interpret syntactic strings. Thewherewithal of this interpretation was semantic features, which strongly resembled thesememes.

12. What gradually ensued was an uneasy imbalance between the language data and adescriptive apparatus which was still to be defined solely by internal, language-basedcriteria separated from variations due to time, place, or identity of speakers. Predictably,convergence and consensus receded dramatically. Groups of linguists proposing differenttypes of rules proliferated; and even linguists who agreed about rule types attainedconflicting descriptions when they moved beyond the more straightforward and well- behaved examples. Decades of further work on rule-systems has not managed either tosupply a complete, definitive description of any language or even to attain consensus about

how we should seek one.13. So if the tests for the u-s-a hypothesis are convergence and consensus ( 6), then

it stands refuted , and we need to reconsider the mainstream research programme basedupon it. My sense is that such a reconsideration is now well under way, but has not beenguided by a sufficiently consolidated and well-argued rationale. The danger persists thatrecent trends may be seen asretreating from scientific standards , whereas we are infactredefinin g those standards (cf. section C).

B. The enduring problem of constraints

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14. Aconstraint can be defined as any factor which makes certain items or patternsmore or less likely than others. The firmest constraints upon language found in linguisticsso far are in phonology, namely the physically defined features of the phonemes and thementally defined capability of differentiating between units that also differ in meaning (6). The physical constraints are the most powerfully distinctive ones: a stop cannot be

both labial and dental, or both voiced and unvoiced. Though speakers may notactually make audible distinctions between, say, [d] and [t], the two phonemes retain their secure and unique positions in the u-s-a system of English phonemes ( 6). The mentalconstraints are less obviously distinctive, but are easily met by finding at least onecontrastive pair like hid and hit, whose members do not mean the same thing. Noticehere that we need not statewhat they mean or in what respects their meanings differ; wemerely need a pair for which nobody would deny the meaningsdo differ (cf. 38!).

15. In morphology, the constraints are already less tractable. Are we to assume, for instance, that the speaker of English is aware of Romance-language-based morphemeslike /in-/ and /im-/ signifying negation and their sensitivity to phonemic position beforedentals (intangible) versus labials (impossible); or of the criteria for using them versus/un-/, /non-/, or /a-/; or of their distinctness from the same set of phonemes and graphemessignifying direction in inject or impale? Or are these constraints merely a historicalsediment of English that has become arbitrary, whereas the constraints on, say, singular versus plural are still active and productive?

16. It was in syntax that the problems of constraints was destined to become trulyvirulent. As we saw in section A, the notion of a system being a repertory of minimalcombinable elements proved explosively unmanageable for syntax and was replaced by thenotion of a system of rules for arranging units into phrases and sentences ( 10). Losingthe constraints supplied by minimalness and by the straightforward procedures for isolating minimal units turned out to be quite costly. A extensive new set of constraints wasrequired which would distinguish all the allowed or grammatical sequences, of whatever length and complexity, from all the disallowed or ungrammatical ones. Since theclassical programme of mainstream linguistics required this job to be done by internal,language-based criteria alone ( 3, 12), the natural constraints of situation and context that

always apply to real data in human interaction were not deemed admissible unless they had been formally reconstructed as purely linguistic rules.

17. The rules were accordingly envisioned to be explicit, formal statements of constraints applying directly to sequences or strings composed not of words as such but of syntactic categories such as NP (noun phrase) or VP (verb phrase). The set of theallowable (or grammatical) category-sequences of a language like English isindefinitelylarge but not, as was claimed,infinitely large , at least not in the genuine mathematicalsense of infinity. A truly infinite system will eventually produceall possible

combinations, evenunimaginably improbable ones, just as in infinite time a roomful of chimpanzees pressing the keys of typewriters will eventually write the works of

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Shakespeare. Such statements tell us nothing about language or about Shakespeare, but aremere tautologies of the concept of infinity. What might actually be infinite is the set of possiblerealizations of suchsequences as utterances , plus the specific details of time, place, tone of voice, etc., which were not addressed by mainstream descriptions anyway,witness tenet (4) in 3.

18. Still, it is troubling to imagine that an indefinitely (let alone infinitely) large set of category sequences might call for an indefinitely (let alone infinitely) large set of rules. Sothe transformational approach was eagerly greeted as a means for constraining the set of proposed rules by postulating rules that convert some sequences into other sequences andthereby provide them all with their respective structural descriptions. This attractive ideanot merely slammed the door shut again on infinity (which, I have suggested, was not reallynecessary) butallowed some sequences to act as constraints on other sequences , withthe rules acting as channels for relaying the constraints. Within this conception, threescenarios were possible:

(a) There exists precisely one such rule set for a given language like English;(b) There exist several, perhaps many such sets.(c) There exists no such set.

Only if (a) holds can we predict a steady trend toward convergence and consensus.19. The confidence that (a) does hold was buoyed up for a time by the expanded

freedom to devise rules that are not in the data but merely held to underlie it. Thefreedom was much enhanced when the domain of rules was expanded from syntax to

include semantics ( 11). But the freedom worked against convergence and consensus aslong as it remained unclear how these semantic constraints could be derived and stated.Syntactic rules had been conceived as constraints on linear orders and needed merely tostate where items should go. Semantic rules had to operate between the domain of meaning, which is hardly linear in any straightforward sense, and the domain of syntax,which presumably is. The sememes like Animate or Human were merely binary; if they were internally ordered, then chiefly by hierarchy, e.g. Human being a subclass of Animate, rather than by linearity. For the rules to operate upon sequences, a feature like

+ Human assigned to a Noun category would be a constraint on what categories can precede (e.g. of Adjectives) or follow (e.g. of Verbs).20. So the transformational generative solution to the spiraling problem of constraints

and rule-sets undercut convergence and consensus still further. Symptomatic here was thevirulent and unresolvable dispute over how much of the formal arranging of sentencesshould be done by the syntax or by the semantics. The standard model held the line infavour of the syntactic component as the sole motor of arranging the sequence which wasthen interpreted by the semantic component; but this scheme made it difficult for thesemantic constraints to actively assist the arranging. In the converse model (generativesemantics), the logical form of the sentence was first set up by the semantics and then

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interpreted by the syntax to yield the actual sentence pattern; but how can logicality,focusing on issues like quantification (e.g. all, some every, etc.), be interfaced withlinearity?

21. The ensuing controversies and of the rapid withdrawal of support for generativesemantics suggest that semantic constraints are vastly more subtle and complicated than

any other constraints linguistics has been seeking. A syntactic sequence is at least a clear arrangement, with some items definitely placed before (or on the left) of other and somesome items definitely placed after (or on the right). But semantics keeps hittingon ambiguities , i.e., on cases where the same linguistic material may have severalmeanings; and so we need a large additional set of constraints to determine which of thosemeanings is the chosen one, e.g. for written examples received in the absence of thewriter:

[1] Blind woman forced by cop to clean up after her guard dog accepts settlement

( Evening Times-Globe [Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada]) 8/17/88[2] State Recycling Skyrockets in 1988 (TulsaWorld 8/18/88)[3] Police chase winds through three towns (Saint Croix Courier [New Brunswick,

Canada.] 12/14/88)[4] Actor sent to jail for not finishing sentence (Knoxville, TN New Sentinel , 1/21/89)

We could resolve [1] by stipulating that accepting a settlement belongs to the class of actions requiring a Human Agent, such as woman but not dog; and that clean up after belongs to the class of standing Prepositional Verbs having their own meanings. We

could resolve [2] and [3] three by alternative syntactic descriptions, with Recycling being Noun, not Verb, and winds being Verb, not Noun; but do we want semantic rules tostipulate that a state cannot recycle skyrockets if it so decides (and can get them back),or that police cannot chase the wind in hopes of apprehending it, say, on charges of vandalism and property damage? For [4], we cant get help from syntax, since bothmeanings of sentence (uttered sequence and court punishment) apply to a simple Noun.Conceivably, an actor could end up in jail for willfully violating a contract by breakingoff his or her performance in mid-sentence. Or, less conceivably, some authority could be

so convinced of the inviolate status of formal grammatical rules as to make incompletesentences a punishable offense. (Lord knows, sillier laws have been passed, such as thatstatute in force on a Norwegian coastal island making it a crime to be in a bad mood in public.)

22. Often, we can only resolve such ambiguities by reasoning about what the writer probably intended to say, based on our knowledge about the world. To assists semantics inthese fresh and thorny tasks of disambiguation, linguistics finally turned to pragmatics,which, being the study of the relation between linguistic expressions and their uses(WebstersSeventh Collegiate Dictionary , p. 667), might seem at odds with the classical programme of mainstream linguistics to study language by itself (cf. 3). However, the

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programme was upheld by conceiving the speaker in a uniform, stable, and abstract (u-s-a) fashion as a faceless supplier of intentions to perform speech acts that constrain themeaning of sentences. The hearer was a similarly faceless recoverer of those intentions. Solanguage remained firmly at the theoretical centre, and the sentence merely acquired thefurther role of a basis for reasoning backwards to the speakers intention(s) and forward to

the hearers recovery of the intention(s). Again, the constraints were to be stated as formalrules at the highest degree of generality.23. In this section, I have argued that the historical development of linguistics was

driven by the search for the one set of constraints that apply all across the language scenario (a) in 18. But the long-range failure to attain or merely to approach convergenceand consensus could well be taken (and has been, e.g. Bierwisch 1965) to support toscenario (b) allowing for several such sets, perhaps a great many. Recent developmentsindicate, however, that the lack of convergence and consensus are instead evidence for scenario (c), stating thatno such set can be ever be discovered . If so, important progressmust wait until the classical programme has been fundamentally revised ( 57-69).

24. Basically, language can be described as a mediating system interposed like a layer between a layer of reality, i.e. the world we live in (however we conceive it to be) and alayer of society, which talks in and about that world. Society can of course go directly toreality by acting upon it, e.g. plowing fields or building houses. But having languagetypically makes most such actions more worthwhile and effective, and makes many other actions possible quite apart from acting upon reality.

25. The classical programme of mainstream linguistics indicates that we can andshould detach language from this configuration and roll the other layers aside. The validityof this move hinges on the deeper (u-s-a) hypothesis that once detached, the languagesystem will stand firm: complete and fully organized by its own internal constraints (cf. 3). The lines of argument I have developed in Sections A and B lead to the oppositeconclusion: that once detached, the system tends to skid out of control, and can only bedescribed if we restore the constraints of reality and society. Much theoretical andreconstructive work in linguistics has in effect been such a restoration but has stopped shortof drawing the conclusion itself. More often, certain constraints of reality and society have

been disguised as formal rules operating upon isolated sentences, each sentence being avalid instantiation of language by itself. When we move beyond straightforward, simpleexamples hand-picked to fit the rules (like John is easy to please), the other missingconstraints take their vengeance upon us by stubbornly blocking convergence andconsensus. And no amount of redoubled ingenuity in designing rules, or extending andrevising the mainstream theories, can ever resolve this impasse.

26. If language were a uniform, and stable, and abstract (u-s-a) system, we couldindeed detach it from reality and society. But such is at most the putativelocal status of

phonology, with every phoneme held uniquely and precisely in place by physical andmental criteria ( 6). But in itsglobal status, language is anevolving system that isnot

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uniform over time , andfluctuates between abstract and concrete . We must take accountof how links are temporarily established to relate items within thecurrent version of thesystem (cf. 48). If we took away the constraints from reality and society that help to buildthese transitory networks, the language system would not stand firm but would skid out of control, whence the principled impossibility of describing it in that state.

27. However, this global status supportslocal frozen islands , to borrow a key termfrom complexity theory (e.g. Kauffman 1990a, b). In language, these islands includeexactly those formal domains or factors that have been successfully described bymainstream morphology and syntax. But many other domains or factors remain in fluxuntil they become relevant for the current version of the language needed to support theongoing discourse. The main reason why linguistics did not attain convergence andconsensus was the inappropriate and untested notion that the global status of the system isfrozen, or can be frozen for purposes of description. Doing this job even partially demandsa heroic freezing action on the linguists part; and the divergence of the outcome from theoutcome of other such actions is not surprising, but inevitable. We might even predict thedegree of divergence by reference to the relative state of flux that is to be frozen: lower inmorphology, higher in syntax, and highest of all in semantics.

28. When language is put to use in discourse, brief local freezings continuallycongeal and then disperse, rather like a liquid at a subcritical stage which readily attaincritical mass and then critical dispersion with modest inputs of energy (cf. Beaugrande,in preparation). Some of the constraints used here come from the standing frozen islands,while others are made to order for the occasion. The demonstration sentences picked for most formal linguistic analysis attempt to take a footing on the standing frozen islands butthey slip off to the degree that this terrain is insufficient and often slippery as well, whencethe disputes among linguists.

C. Formalism versus functionalism

29. Going back to the two basic facts cited at the outset ( 1), we can now contrast twofundamental outlooks on language. The fact that language has a high degree of organization is essential for formalism , a term that can subsume all methodsconstruingform to be the basis and framework of language how entities are shaped or arranged. The fact that people use language to do things isessential for functionalism , a term that can subsume all methods construingfunction to bethe basis and framework of language what means are used toward which ends. In the past, constructive interaction between the two stances has been regrettably hindered by the predisposition of each to regard itself as the outermost framework of language science andits counterpoint as a limited subdomain, as suggested graphically in Fig. 2.

30. The classical programme for describing language by itself has naturally

favoured formalism, since the forms seem to be the most uniform, stable, and abstract (u-s-a) aspects of language, whereas functional aspects tend to be associated with use. So it has

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become conventional in linguistics topresuppose the legitimacy of formalism, whereas thelegitimacy of functionalism must be expressly justified . Formalism was widely held toconfer high scientific status, whereas functionalism was either ignored or else patronizedas unscientific, pre-theoretical, or merely applied. So functional research has beenseverely held back by inappropriate or premature demands for rigor, abstractness,

generality, and so on, stated as absolute, a priori criteria of science.2

One concrete symptomhas been the routine efforts of functionalist methods to justify and defend themselves byconstantly reasserting what ought to be obvious, e.g.:

there is more to using language, and communicating successfully with other people, than being able to produce correct sentences. Not all sentences are interesting, relevant, or suitable; one cannot put any sentence after another and hope that it will mean something.(Cook 1989: 3)

Such an argument would be pointless had not formalism attached vast importance togrammaticality (here, correctness) of the isolated sentence ( 16f), making it thecornerstone of linguistic competence and declining to inquire whether a sentence might beare interesting, relevant, or suitable in actual communication, questions which wouldinevitably reach beyond the boundaries of language by itself (cf. 4).

31. Symptomatic too are the many hesitant compromises in which modest amounts of functional data are cautiously admitted without revising the formalist framework, e.g. insituating functional sentence perspective upon generative semantics; or in whichformalist methods are glibly renamed functional ones, as in structural-functional

grammar. Ironically, these compromises are sometimes faulted for going too far, whereastheir weakness lies rather in not going far enough!

32. In the long run, though, pure formalism runs aground on its own austere principlesand is trapped in irresolvable dilemmas because, I have argued, it is based on hypothesesthat stand refuted by the collective result of linguistic research over at least the past thirtyyears. The promise for a complete, precise formal description of any natural language byitself remains unfulfilled not because linguists have not yet worked out the correct theoryor model, but because no theory can ever freeze the design of language by itself ( 27).

33. I would surmise here that the significant advances of functionalism in recentdecades have reached a turning point a subcritical stage close to critical mass (in thesense of 28). Instead of merely patching up or abetting formalism with sporadic functionalconstraints, we are now seeking a convergence and consensus for theories and modelswhich are genuinely and unabashedly functional from start to finish and which willdetermine the role and valence of formality on that basis. We will bring to fulfillment thelong-standing advocacy of the Prague School scholars led by Vilm Mathesius who proposed that instead of proceeding from form to function, as older linguistics had

done, we proceed from function to form (1926: 198; cf. Mathesius 1975 [1961]; and seenow Nekvapil 1991). Leading in to his contrast between Czech and English sentences,

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Mathesius (1975 [1961]: 84f) suggested that functional factors (e.g. theme) originally preceded formal ones (e.g. Subject) and thus coincided with them for a time, but not for along duration.

34. Let us reconsider in this light the organization of language into levels (cf. 7). Thecharacteristic descriptive formalist scheme had its levels defined by the units of a set of u-

s-a systems, one each for phonemes, morphemes, words or lexemes, and phrases or syntagmemes, each being the subject matter of one established field in linguistics, assuggested in Table 1.

In some sense, these units appear in the data of language samples, at least when they have been transcribed into a consistent visual orthography (cf. 6, 8f). Perhaps encouraged bythis visual medium, the relationship among the levels was assumed, at least implicitly, to be based on a building-block conception of size and constituency , the phonemes being thecomponents of morphemes, the morphemes the components of words, and the words thecomponents of phrases (cf. Bloomfield 1933: 162). Hence, the whole scheme was heldtogether by a ratio of parts to wholes, even though the criteria for defining the respectivetypes of units were not consistent, e.g. features of articulation (like voiced) applying only

to the phonemes. The meaning of a sentence or utterance should accordingly be thestraightforward sum of the meanings of the parts a precept expressly stated by Saussure(1966 [1916]: 121) and Chomsky (1965: 144, 162f), among others. The validity of the precept could not be seriously tested until linguistics proceeded from stipulating that phonemes (can) differentiate meanings and that morphemes have meanings over to statingwhat those meanings are (cf. 6ff, 14).

35. A characteristic functionalist scheme, in contrast, might have levels such asintonation or prosody, lexicogrammar, and discourse, which are the subject-matter of more recent or less established field in linguistics (Table 2).

Intonation or prosody is both the sequence of uttered sounds corresponding to the abstract

units (the phonemes) and the overall curve or melody of pitch, tone, and volume of the

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sounds. The lexicogrammar includes not just the morphemes and the phrase structures, but their cognitive grounding in the communitys system of world-knowledge about how processes and their participants are organized, e.g. whether an Action (e.g. accept asettlement) has a Human Agent (cf. 19, 67) (cf. Longacre 1976; Halliday 1985). Anddiscourse is the total communicative event, including gestures, facial expressions,

emotional displays, and so on. These levels are interrelated not through size andconstituency, but throughmutually determiningfunctions , witness the intonation curves that are typical for certain discourse domains(e.g. political speeches). We can turn here to the influential idea of Frantisek Danes(1964) that one level be regarded as themeans which serve theends of the other levels.

36. This idea can be insightfully applied also to the more familiar scheme of descriptivelevels in order to characterize their relations to each other and to meaning. As shown inTable 3 (up to down axis on the left side),

the levels whose units are typically but not obligatorily smaller are the means for the endsof the levels whose units are typically but not obligatorily larger. Moreover, each level as a

whole is the means for the end of the meanings on that level (left to right axis). And finally,the meanings on the levels whose units are typically but not obligatorily smaller are themeans for the ends of the meanings on the levels whose units are typically but notobligatorily larger (up to down axis on the right side).

37. This formulation seems well-suited to the precepts of pioneering functionalists. Wecan recall here Firths pronouncement that descriptive or structural linguistics shoulddeal with meaning throughout the whole range of the discipline and at all levels of analysis (1968: 50, 160). We can also recall Pikes warning that the sharp-cut

segmentation of meanings is in principle impossible: meaning has its locus not in theindividual bits and pieces, but within the language structure in an identified context(1967: 609, 134). There, the meaning of one unit in part constitutes and is constituted of the meaning of a neighbouring unit (1967: 609). So meaning is a contrastive componentof the entire complex and occurs only as a function of a total behavioural event in a totalsocial matrix (1967: 148f, 609). Pikes view might help resolve such difficulties as arisewhen morphemes seem lexically meaningless or lack an unchanging core of meaning(1967: 184, 186, 598f; cf. Bazell 1949; Bolinger 1950; Hockett 1947; Nida 1948, 1951).

And we can treat semantic variants in terms of how they are conditioned by the universeof discourse (1967: 599).

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38. In the functionalist scheme, relations or ratios of size and constituency are notdecisive, because a means relates to its end first and foremost in terms of its function, purpose, or motivation and only secondarily and at times arbitrarily through its form, shape,or dimensions. The co-presence of several levels follows simply from the requirement thatso complex a system as language must avail itself of several types of items, each type

specialized for some functions more than for others. Each type helps to render it probable(albeit not totally certain) that the active version of the language system will support thestretches of discourse that participants actually process, whose length and complexity aredecided on line by packaging and scheduling strategies (see 44 below) rather thandefined a priori by the units of formal linguistic analysis. For the wherewithal of spokensounds to be sufficiently distinctive to be reliably produced and received, the phonemessupply targets around which the variations of actual uttered and heard speech are clusteredwhile current contextual constraints ensure that mistakes or miscues happen fairly seldomand endanger communication even more seldom. To enable distinctions among thediffering functions of the same word-base (e.g. the stem of a Verb), a language is highlylikely (though not forced) to work with means whose formal signals consist of modifications or expansions of the base; so the morphemes get organized into modestfrozen islands whose borders are stable enough that many cases can be handled withcompact resources, e.g. the Arabic broken or internal plural that modifies the formversus the sound or external plural that adds an ending (like -iin to the masculine and- aat to the feminine in Spoken Iraqi Arabic); even special cases are then readily handled,e.g. for assigning plurals to English words that get borrowed into Arabic, some with theinternal plural like film - aflaam (film/s) and some with the suffixed plural liketilifizyoon - tilifizyoonat (television/s), depending on whether the word happens toresemble native words; even nonce-borrowings follow, as observed in Arab code-switching,e.g. daktoor - dakaatra (doctor/s) versus muudeel - muudeelaat (model/s) (Sallo 1994).Finally, the language needs standing word-base units to carry the brunt of distinctcombinable meanings; hence the lexemes for a large open category whose sub-categories(the parts of speech) may be indicated by morphemic systems or by linear position or by both, whence the dual imperative for syntax. The meaning of the utterance is not registered

separately on any of the levels but is the operational result of the strategies which drawupon these resources as suits the current context. So such questions as how much of theformal arranging of sentences is done by the syntax or by the semantics ( 20) areunanswerable in principle, because meaning is never absent from any level or component.

39. The notions of frozen and flux can help capture the central functionalist notionsof unmarked versus marked , which has often been interpreted merely in terms of higher versus lower frequencies. The standing frozen islands tend to coordinate the most

unmarked options, e g. the Active versus Passive Clause formats of English. The moremarked the options, the more they would tend to involve express momentary freezing.

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The effort of producing and receiving them would depend on this factor rather than onfrequencies of occurrence, which are unduly abstract and computationally unrewarding or in many cases totally unworkable. In a Shakespeare passage like this:

[5] But when the planetsIn evil mixture to disorder wander [...]

Fights, changes, horrorsDivert and crack, rend and deracinateThe unity and married calm of statesQuite from their fixure! (Troilus and Cressida I, iii, 94-101)

the combinations are strikingly marked, e.g. the married calm of states; yet we cancomprehend the meaning (i.e. that disorder follows when the speciality of rule hath beenneglected, as Ulysses says) and appreciate the imagistic effects by performing a similar freezing in our own current versions of the English language, which may require some

literary training.40. Viewed this way, degrees of markedness become the functional successor to

formal degrees of grammaticalness. When an utterance is consensually deemed by nativespeakers to instantiate a grammatical sentence of the language, it is the output channeled predominantly, though (aside from standing clichs like no man is an island) notexclusively, from frozen islands and their immediate vicinity ( 46). So we do not have aclean contrast between yes-or-no or between grammatical versus ungrammatical unlesswe set about to create deliberate non-sentences, an act which necessarily drives a wedge

between our analysis and the empirical realities of language wherein non-data are seldom produced on purpose ( 4).

41. The functionalist project advocated above does not reject formalism at large butrather its claims to be the exclusive source and statement of categories, criteria, andconstraints. Our leading criteria cannot be formality and rigour as ends in themselves, butempirically and computationally supportable descriptions of how a language as a complexsystem can be designed to operate and evolve as rapidly effectively as it evidently does.Formality and rigour will not be rejected but shifted to a new position. The results of

formalism would be bracketed and situated in a deeper and wider perspective, such thatthe patterns and regularities uncovered so far are viewed not parts of a final description or explanation of language but as data which still require a functional description or explanation.

42. A promising pathway for research might be to seek formal and rigorous accounts of the requirements for evolvability in complex systems, such as self-organization andselection (e.g. Kauffmann 1990a, b). Such accounts are now available across a range of sciences, including mathematics, physics (especially condensed matter physics), astronomy,chemistry, biology, immunology, psychology, economics, computer science, engineering,and robotics (e.g. Anderson et al. [eds.] 1988; Langton [ed.] 1988; Perelson [ed.] 1988; Jen

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[ed.] 1989; Stein [ed.] 1989; Langton et al. [eds.] 1992; Zurek [ed.] 1990) and suggestsignificant principles for the new foundations of a science of text and discourse as well(Beaugrande, in preparation). We might thereby explicitly resituate linguistics among theother sciences after a long tradition of either fending off presumed encroachments (as inSaussures claims cited in 2) or making sporadic or sketchy borrowings, e.g. comparing a

grammar that generates all grammatically possible utterances with a chemical theorythat generates all physically possible compounds (Chomsky 1957: 48)43. As an evolving complex system, language would operate not directly with standing

rules but withpowerful packaging and scheduling strategies that select some rulesfrom a standing repertory (e.g. that the English Article precedes the Noun) and generateother rules on the spot (e.g. that recycling is done to commonplace plentiful objects like paper and cans rather than to uncommon objects like skyrockets), and apply the rules insome workable order, sometimes in sequence and sometimes in parallel. These strategiescan freely derive constraints from reality (e.g. that winds are unprofitable to chase) andfrom society (e.g. that uttering grammatically incomplete sentences can hardly be a prisonoffense) (examples from 21).

44. The most powerful constraints would therefore applynot directly to thesentence as a sequence of syntactic categories, as formalist linguists have consistentlyassumed, but rather to thedesign processes which aretuning the current version of thelanguage and generating those constraints needed for the ongoing communicative context.Formalist linguists have, as it were, been looking too far downstream for shallowconstraints on the sentence itself; but these cannot reveal the working of the system until weuncover the deeper constraints upstream that are charged with specifying constraints atvarying degrees of shallowness, including those addressed by formalism as well as thoseabove or below them.

45. It would follow that the language system, or a native speakers competence of it,cannot consist of a complete set of standing formal rules that apply to the sentence (cf. 10, 30). Instead, it consists of a complex of constraints shading outward from a modestinner set of general standing rules (more or less frozen islands) likely to apply in most of the currently active versions of the language, toward outer zones (in flux) wherein more

specific and transitory rules are set up to sustain the one currently active version by meansof operations for search, activation, and regulation of linkages among items in patterns. Therules about which linguists do attain consensus would come from that inner set, while therules which remain in dispute would come from the outer zones (cf. 40). So what wemight take to be an abstract or formal linguistic rule describing a formal sentencestructure would actually be a commonplace selection or output of operations that fluctuateto suit the motivations and organizational demands of the context. The notion that suchmotivations can be parcelled off to components like syntax, semantics and

pragmatics clouds our understanding of the empirical fact that the motivations are products of continual interactions. Placed in abstraction and isolation,those components

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have no organization amenable to complete or definitive empirical discovery and

description, much less to a definitive formalization. Only a fully developed functionalframework can tell us which sections of language can be formalized and to what degrees.

46. The precept that actual communication runs on the currently activated system offersan opportunity to reformulate the whole issue of meaning in terms of which meanings

might be activated at a given moment. One empirical strategy has been developed in recentresearch on priming (e.g. Kintsch 1988, 1989). A probe item is held to beprimed itslevel of activation is raised above the inactive state if people consistently recognize andrespond to it more rapidly than otherwise, e.g., by pressing a key to signal that it either is or is not an English word (Kintsch 1989: 197). During text reception such as reading, theinitial association among a word and its possible meanings was surprisingly found to be notmerelynon-determinate butnon-selective ! So when people are reading a given word in atext, both its relevant and its non-relevant meanings are initially primed and activated; butafter a short time, the non-relevant ones are deactivated while the relevant ones raise their activation and spread it to farther associates. Suppose you are a speaker of English readinga text, on a moving computer display, containing the passage:

[6] The townspeople were amazed to find that all the buildings had collapsed except themint

The text suddenly halts at mint, and the display gives you a target item to decide if its areal word. For a brief interval up to roughly half a second, your response will probablyshow priming for both the relevant target money and the non-relevant candy, but not for

the inferrable earthquake (what caused the buildings to collapse). Thereafter, the non-relevant item loses its priming while the relevant and the inferential items gain. Evidently,the constraints of context exert their control during this interval and regulate the strengthwhereby any one word or meaning is associated with the current control centres of thetopic.

47. The importance of this finding can hardly be overestimated. The resultingconstruction-integration model is distinguished case of a major theoretical revision drivendirectly by empirical data a rare event in the study of language by linguistics and

language philosophy. We find concrete evidence that the meaning of a discourse is not justconstructed on the spot, but with extremely cheap rules in fact, rules may not be the proper term at all. The processing of the discourse at the receptive end first activates thenodes within the knowledge network that are stored for the each word (or word-part) being recognized. This activation automatically spreads to the meaning-nodes in the samenetwork. The now active network (suggested by right-hand graphic of figure 2 in 26) runsthrough several cycles whereby the strengths of the connections are adjusted, some beingraised and others lowered; and which adjustments occur is evidently determined by theconstraints of the context. Here, linguistics and semantics would frame the leadingquestion: what sort of rules could possibly be skilled and rapid enough to do the job? And

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how could they be called up and applied if, at (or near) the split second when they areneeded, the processor has not resolved ambiguous word senses?

48. The answers may lie in a striking parallel that has come to the fore in complexitytheory, relating again to the requirements for evolvability in complex systems cited in 42, namely the concepts of self-organization and increasing returns under the folksy

motto: them that has, gets (Waldrop 1992: 17; see Beaugrande, in preparation, for detailsand sources). The most rudimentary requirements for self-organizing processes have beenstudied in research on the cellular automaton , a self-operating mechanism embodying aprogrammable universe wherein time is ticked off by a cosmic clock and space is filledwith an arrangement of discrete cells, each of which can be in only one of a fixedrepertory of states, say, either living or dead (compare Burks 1970). With each tick of theclock, this automaton makes atransition to a new state determined by its own current stateand the current state of its neighbors. The laws of such a universe can be encoded in atransition table stating the rules for changing from any current state to a possibleconsequent state. A cellular automaton can be simulates with current computer technology , e.g. as a program for generating patterns of dots on a screen according to rulesspecified by the programmer (see Wolfram 1984; Wolfram [ed.] (1986). The simulationsuncovered a surprising regularity conforming to only four classes of rules (Table 4),whose names I have reformulated somewhat (compare Waldrop 1990: 225ff).

Class 1 are doomsday rules : no matter what random pattern of living or dead cells youstart with, they all get rapid death within a few time-steps, and the grid on the computer screen goes completely uniform. Stated within the theory of dynamical systems, these ruleshave a single point attractor, like a marble rolling around in a basin: wherever it started itwould soon roll down and stop in the centre. Class 2 are stagnation rules whereby theinitial pattern soon congeals into stable blobs that sit there in a lethargy of faint, regular oscillations. In dynamical systems, these rules have a set of periodic attractors, like a pattern of hollows in a bumpy bowl, in each of which the marble could keep rolling gently but indefinitely. Class 3 are chaotic rules that produce an excess of activity, and the gridon the screen appears to be boiling with a chaos (in an ordinary sense) of structures sounpredictable and unstable that they break up almost as soon as they form. In dynamicalsystems, these rules have a set of strange attractors, like a marble rolling around in a bowlso fast and furiously that it can never settle down. Finally, Class 4 are self-organizingrules that produce an order of structures which multiply, grow, split, and recombine incoherent patterns but dont ever fully settle down. These rules, which have no correlated

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attractor in the theory of dynamical systems, seem the most similar to the basic principlesthat could construct life-systems and their processes and in fact generate patterns quitereminiscent, say, of the growth of ferns.

49. Programmers kept putting in rules and sorting them into one of these four classes just by watching the results, hoping that the classes can be reliably distinguished by some

definable property. And, surprisingly, one such property was found in the straightforwardsurvival probability , i.e. the likelihood that any given cell would be alive in the nextgeneration ticked off the clock (shown in Table 1). A probability near 0 goes withdoomsday rules, and everything dies off almost at once. A somewhat higher probabilitygoes with stagnation rules, and things survive but in stasis. A 50-50 probability goes withchaotic rules, and each cell switches constantly from life to death and back, so thatnothing can stay organized. A critical threshold around 27.3% turns out to go with self-organizing rules, where life-like structures arise spontaneously.

50. The findings in priming during the reception of discourse strongly suggest that theretoo, some mode of self-organization must be at work, and that its key feature is again theregulation of critical values, as has in fact been simulated on computers by Kintschs group.The nodes whose mutual linkage is near these values will become attractors for their surrounding sectors in the knowledge network and thence the control centres for buildingup the array of knowledge that corresponds to the meaning of the discourse as theconstruct of the receiver (here the reader), and not as the output of shallow rules called upto map out specific phrase structures, transform them into others, and to interpret theresult by pasting together the meanings of the constituent formal pieces. The simulations bythe Kintsch group in Colorado and the group around David Rumelhart and JamesMcClelland in California indicate that an associative network can support a coherent arrayof text meaning (Kintschs textbase) by adjusting strengths of linkage in a connectionistmanner (cf. Rumelhart & McClelland 1986). Here, concepts are defined in a knowledgenet by meaning constructed from their position in the net; immediate associates andsemantic neighbors of a node constitute its core meaning, whereas its complete and fullmeaning could be obtained only by exploring its relations to all the other nodes in the net(Kintsch 1988: 164). If so, the attempts of classical semantics to expound the exact

meanings of words necessarily branches out indefinitely, whence the conspicuous lack of convergence and consensus noted in 11f.

51. I would see a confirmation here for my own long-standing conjecture (e.g.Beaugrande 1987, written in 1985) that language processing entails a significant margin of non-determinacy that has not been adequately reflected in linguistic theory but is vital for managing language complexity and fluctuation, especially within the subsystem of semantics. Against the deterministic research tradition of modelling knowledge use incomprehension by designing powerful rules to ensure that the right elements are generated

in the right context, Kintsch and his group have shown us how much can be accounted for by a weaker production system whose rules are just powerful enough that the right

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element is likely to be among those generated along with irrelevant or inappropriate ones(Kintsch 1988: 163f). Such a system can operate in many contexts, as befits discourseenvironments characterized by almost infinite variability (ibid.). So a computationalmodel of text comprehension as the construction of a mental representation of a text withsimple, though rough and crude rules being used promiscuously, followed by a wholistic

integration phase that produces a coherent picture, would seem to be psychologicallymore plausible and computationally more flexible than the precise rules that classicalsemantics has envisioned (Kintsch 1992: 263).

52. Computers have also made a significant advance in a different direction but againindicating that relatively few constraints (universal frozen islands) apply all across thelanguage as an abstract system. The majority apply rather to discourse domains or contexts,some sparser, some richer. These contexts, which have largely remained implicit inostensibly formal analysis ( 4), can now be systematically described through hugecomputerized corpuses of real language data, such as the Bank of English at theBirmingham University, which, as of January 1994, contains several hundred millions of words of running text, with an operational sample corpus of 167 million words of text from797 British and American books; newspapers (Times, Independent, Guardian, Today, Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, Economist ); magazines; radio broadcasts (BBC and NPR);and recordings of conversations4 (cf. Baker at al. [eds.] 1993). Such data banks can revealregularities that simply arent evident either from modest samples or from introspection of native speakers (Sinclair 1992a, b). The question of how general a given regularity might beis no longer a matter of intuition subtly biased by a vested interest in situating things on thehighest plane ( 5, 17, 33). Instead, it is a matter to be verified by looking at sets of contextsin which key words appear more often or less often, and at the phrasings which frequentlylink certain word-types.

53. An interesting case in point is the Verb build up. If used in the Active as aProductive Process with a Human Agent as Subject and with a Target, the corpuscollocations show an ameliorative attitude (e.g. when you build up an organisation); usedin the Medial with a non-human Subject as Developmental Process and no Target, thecollocations show a pejorative attitude (e.g. when cholesterol builds up in the body)

(Louw 1993: 171).4 In formalist linguistics, such a factor would probably be set aside assubjective, vague, or simply extralinguistic.

54. Admittedly, the display of data by no means eliminates the need for carefulinterpretation by the investigator nor transfers it over onto the computer. The assignment of attitudes just mentioned is still a subjective decision based on our world knowledge aboutwhether things involved with building up are good or bad. But such a display of data isthe surest basis I can see for regaining convergence and consensus about the nature and theextent of potential regularities of a language, including ones that might go unnoticed or

might turn out to be quite different than we would conclude by relying only on our intuitions and introspections (cf. 10). Thus, the advent of reliable large-corpus data should

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be a fine opportunity for reconsidering how to build functional theories and methods closelyattuned to realistic data.

D. Conclusion and outlook

55. I have attempted to assemble theoretical and empirical considerations which, taken

together, may explain why functionalism is rapidly gaining today and becoming themajority position. The shift has been driven largely by problems thrown up by conventionalformalist methods, especially by the search for richer constraints than such methods can provide as long as the point of view is always the hypothetical uniform, stable, and abstract(u-s-a) system.

56. The recent research and findings sketched in the foregoing section at least justifysome optimism that within the framework of discourse and discourse processing we canfind theories and models of language that attain impressive degrees of rigour and formality

without remaining bound to the classical programme of mainstream linguisticssummarized in 3 and especially to the now refuted u-s-a hypothesis (cf. 5f, 10, 13f, 22,25f). In their stead, we could seek to formulate a post-classical programme with new setof hypotheses like these:

(1a) A language should be considered afluctuating andevolving system moving from

oneactivated version to another.(2a) Language constitutes acommunicative system defined byinternal and external

criteria .(3a) Language is a phenomenonintegrated with many other domains of human

knowledge or activity .(4a) The language should be describedin respect to variations due to time, place, or

identity of speakers .(5a) The description of a language should be couched in statementsat varying degrees

of generality between the entire language and the specific discourse context.

Despite first appearances, such a programme does not promise to undermine consensus byadmitting a wealth of complications and alternatives that had previously been filtered out.Instead, it shifts the search for consensus to a higher plane, where we agree to use allavailable investigative means to determine the validity of such hypotheses instead of merely placing them as eternal first principles ahead of and above our day-to-day inquiries.

57. The new generation of functional theories and methods will undoubtedly look rather different in several ways from the varieties that have long held centre stage informalist linguistics. I shall wind up by citing twelve prospects we can foresee. First, wewill need a flexible outlook for sorting out an onrush of functional data , including much

that has not been given prominent roles in conventional linguistics. For instance, pejorative

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and ameliorative speaker attitudes cited in 54 will need to be admitted as a validconstraint.

58. Second, we can expect acritical reappraisal of seemingly secure principle s of linguistics. A prominent instance here is the venerable distinction between thegrammar asa set of patterns and phrasing versus thelexicon as the set of words and idioms in the

vocabulary of the language (cf. Francis 1993). The usual arrangement has been that thegrammar gets the regularities and the lexicon gets the irregularities (e.g. Sweet 1913 [1875-76]: 31; Chomsky 1965: 86f, 142, 214ff). The data from the Bank of English reveal that aconsiderable number of lexical items have distinctive grammatical proclivities; andconversely, that certain grammatical phrasings are highly likely to take certain types of lexemes, e.g. ones indicating the attitude of the speaker, as we just saw.

59. Third, we can anticipate new pressure toreconsider our familiar divisions that parcel out language into levels (or components). Whereas the characteristic formalistscheme had levels defined by the units of langue and related in terms of size andconstituency displays, the functionalist scheme sees the levels related to each other and tothe types of meaning in terms of means and ends (cf. 35-38). The mapping betweenmeans and ends is only secondarily executed in terms of forms and patterns and issubstantially more adaptive and non-deterministic than the mapping between parts andwholes.

60. Fourth, we will need toofficially discard the langue/paroledichotomy descended from Saussure a move already prefigured by functionalists (Trnka1964; Pike 1967; Halliday 1973; Stubbs 1993), since we have exhausted the issues that can be treated under its auspices and have been unduly confined from there on. The mostinteresting new statements we can make about language will be those showing how anEnglish text or discourse is adialectic that reconciles the two Saussurian poles: someaspects are more general for the language at large and some are specific to the singlesituation. To tell which is which, we need no longer rely on intuitions or follow our vestedinterest toward the general, but can display and collate the contexts within a large corpus,and see which aspects are in fact the more typical ones.

61. Fifth,unified functional categories may subsume diverse formal categories . In a

cognitive functional grammar, the categories of world-knowledge about how Processes(Events and Actions) are organized ( 35) can productively group categories according towhether and how they indicate what brings the process about. This suggest beside thefamiliar distinction between Active and Passive, where the Agent is more likely to beexplicit for the first than the second, a large class of Medials wherein the Agent in themedium of the process, e.g. when a person behaves or grows taller but also when a person is tired or feels ill. This class cuts across the formally defined classestraditionally called Intransitive Copulative and Intransitive Complete.

62. Sixth, we mightexplore why some functional categories are more typicallyexpressed in some formal patterns rather than others . The English Imperative is among

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the clearest indicators of Process types, apparently because it has remained relativelyunaffected by the diversification of social roles following the rise of the middle andworking classes, during which more indirect and adaptable means of command and requestwere derived instead from Modal Verb constructions, Interrogatives, and so on. Here, wemight inquire into the real and social constraints on commanding an Action, e.g that the

Action have a genuine intentional Agent capable of performing it and controlling it. Morespecifically, the prototypical Emotives in English do not make the Agent the controllingMedium but a Medium in a vaguely controlled State expressed as a Modifier with a Verblike be and feel, e.g. be happy and feel sad.6 For social motives, the unmarkedImperatives are Positive with the Ameliorative Aspect, e.g. be happy!, but Negative withthe Pejorative Aspect, e.g. dont feel sad! (Beaugrande, in prep.). Conversely, theseImperatives tell us about how a society rates Emotions and sets the display rules for these.

63. Seventh,functional accounts need not be strictly linguistic in sense of theclassical mainstream programme that (in terms of the layer-cake parable, 24f) sought todetach language from its role of a mediating system interposed between reality andsociety on the deeper (u-s-a) hypothesis that once detached, the language system willstand (compare 3, 26). In contrast, the hypothesis just cited about English Imperativescould lead to social and cultural research on the typical strategies for giving commands. In apre-modern culture with firm beliefs in the power of ritual magic to affect the weather, acommand like sun, ripen our crops! might be unmarked in a ritual context, whereas in amodern Western society it might seem childish or facetious. In such respects, large-corpusdata will often suggest hypotheses that lead the statement of function constraintstowardcultural contexts .

64. Eighth, the foregoing prospects mightopen new horizons for cross-culturalstudies , provided that similar empirical tests and large corpuses could be carried out for other languages besides English. In mainstream linguistics, the common demand thatgrammatical description should recognize only those linguistic distinctions which areformally expressed (stipulated even by Firth 1957a [1951]: 222) has been offset somewhat by the accumulation of languages in which these distinctions are quite diverse, witnessBloomfields (1933: 176) surprise sentence and disappointment sentence accredited

because they are formally signalled in Menomini though not in English. The accumulationhas made linguists sensitive to a wide range of functional categories, even if demands likeFirths have made them wary about going beyond the formal classes of the individuallanguage. It is surely no coincidence that the pioneers in British functional research, suchas Firth and Halliday, were Orientalists who urgently needed functional categories todescribe languages like Chinese or Hindustani. We can not turn again to languages likeEnglish with a sharpened sense for functions that are not formally signalled but are no lessvital, e.g the intonation contours that reliably convey surprise and disappointment.

65. Ninth, new approaches willrequire a theoretical superstructure in keeping witha stated cognitive interest , simply because we cannot master such a volume and variety of

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data and aspects without setting clear priorities (Beaugrande, in preparation). A theorytailored to teaching English for special purposes (ESP), e.g. the discourse of computer science, may look quite different from a theory tailored to teaching English as a foreignlanguage (EFL). In the former case, the overall tendencies shown by a large corpus will beless decisive than those shown by a subcorpus for the discourse domain in question;5 in the

latter case, the sampling from which teachable instances are to be drawn will need to beadjusted to the culture of the prospective learners and to the discourse strategies of thenative language. In both areas, most theories and methods put forward so far have not been based on adequate representative data, and have been organized more by formal than byfunctional criteria.

66. Tenth, whereas formal analysis is usually considered finished when it has attainedan exhaustive segmentation of the data or rewritten them all into formal notation and staterules that assign a structural description, a functional analysis would elect to stop when ithasattained ecological validity by providing some relevant and non-trivial insightinto discursive practices , e.g. how some discourse strategies make knowledge morewidely accessible than others (Beaugrande, 1991b, 1991c, in prep.) and how strategiesmight support equality among participants and bring practices of inequality to heightenedawareness (cf. Atkinson and Heritage [eds.] 1984; Chilton [ed.] 1985; van Dijk 1988, [ed.]1990; Fairclough 1989; Wodak [ed.] 1989; Drew and Heritage [eds.] 1992). This work would motivate the analysis to lead into constructive and collaborative social interventions,e.g,. to design writing programs for training people to use the strategies that makeknowledge more widely accessible (cf. Halliday and Martin 1993). Striving for suchecological validity requires us to weigh potential applications in advance of our research,whereas applications of formalism are typically made after the fact or not at all, since thetop goal is to subserve some abstract and timeless ideals of science and rigour. For example, the typical formalist conflation of spoken with written language must yield to acareful differentiation if we want to apply our research to such issues as improved readingand writing programs (cf. Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987; merjkov and ticha [eds.]1994).

67. Eleventh, we stand to gain if we do not assume that an analysis is valid only when it

converts natural language data into a formal representation, e.g., English sentences into theformulas of predicate calculus, upon which rules can easily act because they are written inmuch the same notation. According to my line of argument, this act means freezing thedata, on the untested assumption that they are reliably maintained within the system in afrozen state. Insofar as the freezing also sheds contextual constraints, it defeats rather thanadvances the search for a complete, definitive analysis and undermines convergence andconsensus. It seems more productive toretain the text or discourse as its ownrepresentation in some orthography whose use favours convergence and consensus, and

apply clearly stated strategies of description, analysis, and explanation, such as a cognitivefunctional grammar situated close to semantic and pragmatic concerns (cf. Halliday 1985:

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xvif) ( 35, 61). These strategies place the method in a user-friendly proximity to the datayet ensure that it does not converge with them.

68. Twelfth, functional approaches can offer the new labours they bring by offeringsome decided advantages. They will beeminently suited to treat real data that has not been cleaned up or idealized at all except insofar as is necessary for transcription into the

corpus. Also such approaches will bemuch more user-friendly , since no special trainingwould be demanded for rewriting the data into elaborate formal representations. For many purposes,regularities such as that noted for build up can be presented in sensible everydaydiscourse to wider circles, such as language teachers or authors of style manuals. Notes

1 See my survey in Beaugrande (1991) for specific sources and quotes. The termsclassical and mainstream linguistics are used here merely heuristically for

conventional notions which were either stated in central works and frequently cited fromthese or else taken for granted; and which dominated the agendas in academies,universities, professional conferences, and so on.

2 According to a convention not yet fixed in early linguistics, phonemes, as abstract soundunits get placed in slanting lines but as phonetic descriptions get placed in square brackets (e.g. Moulton 1962: 4); if morphemes are sequences of phonemes ( 34), theformer notation should apply. Conceptually, however, the difference is much less clear than the visual appearance, and does not acknowledge how much of the work is really

being done by the letters of the alphabet. Already, conventions of notation were enlistedin constraining the analysis without sufficient awareness of the implications (cf. 15).

3 An egregious case was Dresslers (1970) attack on the Prague School, taking it as giventhat functionalist methods must identify all relevant formal units, along with their boundaries and mutual position, before progress can be made.

4 Data kindly provided by Ramesh Krishnamurthy, then Development Manager at Cobuild(now at Aston University), in a letter to me of April 13, 1994.

5 Mr. Krishnamurthy informs me that Cobuild has a consolidated suite of in-house programs that allow us to select any combination of subcorpora and provide us withconcordances and with information on frequency, collocation, and word-class(compare Note 4).

6 Though limitations of space preclude an explicit presentation here, I use here the termsfor Processes and Aspects from the cognitive functional grammar set forth inBeaugrande (1997), which draws on and modifies such functional grammars as Halliday(1985); compare Chafes (1970) semantic structure and Longacres (1976) notionalstructure.

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