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 and
method over the years have been influenced by a ‘classical formalist’ ambience that
suited conventional ideas about how science ought to proceed but fostered an
idealized ‘frozen’ conception of the language system in isolation form reality and
society. Today, the tide is turning toward functionalist accounts of language; but the
accompanying shift in our scientific programme calls for careful reflection. Some
deep-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 that language has
a 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 that people use language to
do things — to ‘mean’ things and to achieve things. Within the big picture of language
adopted by speakers and hearers in everyday life, these two facts seldom compete or
conflict. Yet the study of language has often sought to choose either the one fact or the
other — either how language ‘by itself’ is organized or what people use language to do. If
you face such a decision, the first choice may well look more appealing in promising a
smaller, 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 the
organization of language and divide up the labour of our studies, one person or group
studying the sounds, another the words, another the phrases, and so on. Once all these items
have 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, ranging
from ‘traditional grammar’ up through philology and modern linguistics, has been devoted
to ‘language by itself’. When Saussure’s influential Course in General Linguistics
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 in
connection 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 contribute
only 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 a uniform, stable, and abstract system in a single
stage of its evolution.
(2) This system is to be defined by internal, language-based criteria.
(3) Language is a phenomenon distinct from other domains of human knowledge or
activity.
(4) A language should be described apart from variations due to time, place, or
identity of speakers.
(5) The description of a language should be couched in statements at a high 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-sufficient
conception of language that stands firm while we are describing it (cf. § 26, 65).
4. Most of the theoretical and practical problems throughout modern linguistics have
arisen from the tendency to consider tenets (1-5) as fundamental postulates which any
science 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 but
henceforth essential borderline between ‘linguistic’ versus ‘extra-linguistic’ or ‘non-
linguistic’ data, issues, explanations, and so on (cf. § 30, 63). Since ‘language by itself’ is
not a ‘fact’ or ‘object’ directly presented to observation, linguistics sought to construct it
by sheer theoretical bootstrapping. The most fateful consequence has been the idea that
language can be removed from all contexts for purposes of rigorous analysis; in fact, such
analysis merely creates a different and special context, one that may exert powerful but
largely unacknowledged controls on the language data (cf. § 40, 54).
5. Let us focus here on hypothesis (1) stating that language should be considered a
uniform, stable, and abstract system, which can be called for short the u-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 indeed
discover such a ‘u-s-a system’ for a given ‘natural language’ like English. The discovery
process has proceeded by means of conventional data-handling strategies, such as:

(1) collating: a large set of data samples are compared and contrasted to distill out what
they 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 a
typical pattern for the language as a whole;
(3) rarefying: the ‘rich’ data are rendered more ‘sparse’ by disregarding certain aspects
or 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 expressly
deployed to produce those results? To escape circularity, the key tests would surely be
the convergence among data discovered and described, and the consensus among linguists
about 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 uniquely
described 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 and
written 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, each
‘phoneme’ 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 sound
systems in ‘phonemics’ or ‘phonology’ into the ‘model paradigm’ in modern linguistics,
e.g. when Firth (1957a [1951]: 222; 1968 [1957b]: 191) recommended that ‘phonemic
description should serve primarily as a basis for the statement of grammatical and lexical
facts’, and that ‘linguistic analysis’ should have ‘the same rigorous control of formal
categories’ as ‘in all phonological analysis’. A lasting heritage of this view has been the

3
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 a repertory of minimal
combinable elements comparable to ‘phonemes’. Acomplete description of a language
would be the sum of the descriptions for each subsystem, supplied by linguists working in
the several areas within a neat ‘division of labour’. For a time, some linguists (especially in
America) insisted that ‘rigid, water-tight compartments or levels are aesthetically satisfying
and 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 Pike
1967: 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 the
subsystem of sounds. The subsystem of minimal meaningful forms, called ‘morphemes’, is
already less tidy. Convergence and consensus are fairly high
for 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-defined
than the articulatory criteria of phonology. But convergence and consensus are rather lower
for classifying morphemes into categories, since observed linear positions by themselves do
not afford explicit, clean-cut indications of category; at most, we can set up some categories
whose names indicate where items appear, e.g. ‘prefixes’ in front, ‘suffixes’ behind, and
‘infixes’ in the middle. Some languages do present specific morphemic sectors, such as the
inflections of Nouns and Verbs, which can be precisely and exhaustively described; yet
even there, complexities can arise, e.g., the category of ‘English Noun plural morphemes’
written ‘-s’ or ‘-es’ but pronounced /s/, /z/, /∂s/, or /∂z/2 , plus the ‘zero morpheme’ not
written at all (like ‘sheep’). Otherwise, the majority of ‘morphemes’ fall into very large and
fuzzy 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 ‘morphemes’
for 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 not
of minimal units but of complex units (sometimes called ‘syntagmemes’ after the terms
‘phonemes’ and ‘morphemes’) ranging from just one morpheme (e.g. ‘help!’) up to an
extensive 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’ and
‘Predicate’ can leave tricky residues, e.g., signals of the speaker’s 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. But
the reasons why an observed pattern of words and phrases has that shape must be inferred.

4
 10. Evidently, the methods of identifying and classifying units into repertories had
supported 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 role
of ‘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 units
into phrases and sentences. Yet since — unlike the units — these ‘rules’ plainly do not
appear ‘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 assumed
a key dual role not just in relating the rules to discovered data but in generating invented
data 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 to
overshadow the other data-handling strategies, especially the strategies of ‘collating
samples’ and ‘consulting informants’.
11. The state of affairs was most diffuse in semantics, the investigation of the meanings
of language. While phonology was the model paradigm, semantics had sought to set up a
repertory 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’. The
wherewithal of this ‘interpretation’ was ‘semantic features’, which strongly resembled the
‘sememes’.
12. What gradually ensued was an uneasy imbalance between the language data and a
descriptive apparatus which was still to be defined solely by internal, language-based
criteria separated from variations due to time, place, or identity of speakers. Predictably,
convergence and consensus receded dramatically. Groups of linguists proposing different
types of rules proliferated; and even linguists who agreed about rule types attained
conflicting descriptions when they moved beyond the more straightforward and well-
behaved examples. Decades of further work on rule-systems has not managed either to
supply 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 based
upon it. My sense is that such a reconsideration is now well under way, but has not been
guided by a sufficiently consolidated and well-argued rationale. The danger persists that
recent trends may be seen as retreating from scientific standards, whereas we are in
fact redefining those standards (cf. section C).

B. The enduring problem of ‘constraints’

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 14. A constraint can be defined as any factor which makes certain items or patterns
more or less likely than others. The firmest constraints upon language found in linguistics
so far are in phonology, namely the physically defined features of the phonemes and the
mentally 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 not
actually 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 mental
constraints are less obviously distinctive, but are easily met by finding at least one
contrastive pair like ‘hid’ and ‘hit’, whose members do not mean the same thing. Notice
here that we need not statewhat they mean or in what respects their meanings differ; we
merely need a pair for which nobody would deny the meanings do 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 morphemes
like /in-/ and /im-/ signifying negation and their sensitivity to phonemic position before
dentals (‘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 graphemes
signifying direction in ‘inject’ or ‘impale’? Or are these constraints merely a historical
sediment 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 truly
virulent. As we saw in section A, the notion of a system being a repertory of minimal
combinable elements proved explosively unmanageable for syntax and was replaced by the
notion of a system of ‘rules’ for arranging units into phrases and sentences (§ 10). Losing
the 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 was
required which would distinguish all the allowed or ‘grammatical’ sequences, of whatever
length and complexity, from all the disallowed or ‘ungrammatical’ ones. Since the
‘classical’ 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 the
allowable (or ‘grammatical’) category-sequences of a language like English is indefinitely
large but not, as was claimed, infinitely large, at least not in the genuine mathematical
sense of ‘infinity’. A truly infinite system will eventually produce all possible
combinations, even unimaginably improbable ones, just as in infinite time a roomful of
chimpanzees pressing the keys of typewriters will eventually write the works of

6
Shakespeare. Such statements tell us nothing about language or about Shakespeare, but are
mere tautologies of the concept of infinity. What might actually be infinite is the set of
possible realizations of such sequences 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. So
the ‘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 and
thereby provide them all with their respective ‘structural descriptions’. This attractive idea
not merely slammed the door shut again on infinity (which, I have suggested, was not really
necessary) but allowed some sequences to act as constraints on other sequences, with
the rules acting as channels for relaying the constraints. Within this conception, three
scenarios 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. The
freedom was much enhanced when the domain of rules was expanded from syntax to
include semantics (§ 11). But the freedom worked against convergence and consensus as
long 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 to
state 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 the
virulent and unresolvable dispute over how much of the formal arranging of sentences
should be done by the syntax or by the semantics. The ‘standard’ model held the line in
favour of the ‘syntactic component’ as the sole motor of arranging the sequence which was
then ‘interpreted’ by the ‘semantic component’; but this scheme made it difficult for the
semantic constraints to actively assist the arranging. In the converse model (‘generative
semantics’), the ‘logical form’ of the sentence was first set up by the semantics and then

7
‘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 with
linearity?
21. The ensuing controversies and of the rapid withdrawal of support for ‘generative
semantics’ 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 some
some items definitely placed after (or on the ‘right’). But semantics keeps hitting
on ambiguities, i.e., on cases where the ‘same’ linguistic material may have several
meanings; and so we need a large additional set of constraints to determine which of those
meanings is the chosen one, e.g. for written examples received in the absence of the
writer:

[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 (Tulsa World 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 to
stipulate 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 can’t get help from syntax, since both
meanings 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 breaking
off 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 incomplete
sentences a punishable offense. (Lord knows, sillier laws have been passed, such as that
statute 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 in
these fresh and thorny tasks of ‘disambiguation’, linguistics finally turned to ‘pragmatics’,
which, being the study of ‘the relation between linguistic expressions and their uses’
(Webster’s Seventh Collegiate Dictionary, p. 667), might seem at odds with the ‘classical’
programme of ‘mainstream’ linguistics to study ‘language by itself’ (cf. § 3). However, the

8
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 the
meaning of sentences. The hearer was a similarly faceless recoverer of those intentions. So
language remained firmly at the theoretical centre, and the sentence merely acquired the
further role of a basis for reasoning backwards to the speaker’s intention(s) and forward to
the hearer’s recovery of the intention(s). Again, the constraints were to be stated as formal
‘rules’ 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 convergence
and consensus could well be taken (and has been, e.g. Bierwisch 1965) to support to
scenario (b) allowing for several such sets, perhaps a great many. Recent developments
indicate, however, that the lack of convergence and consensus are instead evidence for
scenario (c), stating that no such set can be ever be discovered. If so, important progress
must 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 a
layer of ‘society’, which talks in and about that world. Society can of course go directly to
reality by acting upon it, e.g. plowing fields or building houses. But having language
typically 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 and
should detach language from this configuration and roll the other layers aside. The validity
of this move hinges on the deeper (‘u-s-a’) hypothesis that once detached, the language
system 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 opposite
conclusion: that once detached, the system tends to skid out of control, and can only be
described if we restore the constraints of reality and society. Much theoretical and
reconstructive work in linguistics has in effect been such a restoration but has stopped short
of 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 a
valid instantiation of ‘language by itself’. When we move beyond straightforward, simple
examples hand-picked to fit the rules (like ‘John is easy to please’), the other missing
constraints take their vengeance upon us by stubbornly blocking convergence and
consensus. And no amount of redoubled ingenuity in designing rules, or ‘extending’ and
‘revising’ the ‘mainstream’ theories, can ever resolve this impasse.
26. If language were a uniform, and stable, and abstract (‘u-s-a’) system, we could
indeed detach it from reality and society. But such is at most the putative local status of
phonology, with every ‘phoneme’ held uniquely and precisely in place by physical and
mental criteria (§ 6). But in its global status, language is an evolving system that is not

9
uniform over time, and fluctuates between abstract and concrete. We must take account
of how links are temporarily established to relate items within the current version of the
system (cf. § 48). If we took away the constraints from reality and society that help to build
these 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 supports local frozen islands, to borrow a key term
from complexity theory (e.g. Kauffman 1990a, b). In language, these islands include
exactly those formal domains or factors that have been successfully described by
‘mainstream’ morphology and syntax. But many other domains or factors remain in flux
until they become relevant for the current version of the language needed to support the
ongoing discourse. The main reason why linguistics did not attain convergence and
consensus was the inappropriate and untested notion that the global status of the system is
frozen, or can be frozen for purposes of description. Doing this job even partially demands
a heroic ‘freezing’ action on the linguist’s part; and the divergence of the outcome from the
outcome of other such actions is not surprising, but inevitable. We might even predict the
degree of divergence by reference to the relative state of flux that is to be frozen: lower in
morphology, higher in syntax, and highest of all in semantics.
28. When language is put to use in discourse, brief local ‘freezings’ continually
congeal and then disperse, rather like a liquid at a ‘subcritical stage’ which readily attain
‘critical 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 but
they slip off to the degree that this terrain is insufficient and often slippery as well, whence
the disputes among linguists.

C. Formalism versus functionalism

29. Going back to the two ‘basic facts’ cited at the outset (§ 1), we can now contrast two
fundamental outlooks on language. The ‘fact’ that language has a high degree of
organization is essential for formalism, a term that can subsume all methods
construing form to be the basis and framework of language —
how entities are shaped or arranged. The ‘fact’ that people use language to do things is
essential for functionalism, a term that can subsume all methods construing function to be
the 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 and
its 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

10
become conventional in linguistics to presuppose the legitimacy of formalism, whereas the
legitimacy of functionalism must be expressly justified. Formalism was widely held to
confer high ‘scientific’ status, whereas functionalism was either ignored or else patronized
as ‘unscientific’, ‘pre-theoretical’, or merely ‘applied’. So functional research has been
severely 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 symptom
has been the routine efforts of functionalist methods to justify and defend themselves by
constantly 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 to
‘grammaticality’ (here, ‘correctness’) of the isolated sentence (§ 16f), making it the
cornerstone of ‘linguistic competence’ and declining to inquire whether a sentence might be
are interesting, relevant, or suitable in actual communication, questions which would
inevitably 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. in
situating ‘functional sentence perspective’ upon ‘generative semantics’; or in which
formalist methods are glibly renamed ‘functional’ ones, as in ‘structural-functional’
grammar. Ironically, these compromises are sometimes faulted for going too far, whereas
their weakness lies rather in not going far enough!
32. In the long run, though, pure formalism runs aground on its own austere principles
and is trapped in irresolvable dilemmas because, I have argued, it is based on hypotheses
that stand refuted by the collective result of linguistic research over at least the past thirty
years. The promise for a complete, precise formal description of any natural ‘language by
itself’ remains unfulfilled not because linguists have not yet worked out the ‘correct’ theory
or 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 recent
decades have reached a turning point — a ‘subcritical stage’ close to ‘critical mass’ (in the
sense of § 28). Instead of merely patching up or abetting formalism with sporadic functional
constraints, we are now seeking a convergence and consensus for theories and models
which are genuinely and unabashedly functional from start to finish and which will
determine the role and valence of formality on that basis. We will bring to fulfillment the
long-standing advocacy of the ‘Prague School’ scholars led by Vilém 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 see
now Nekvapil 1991). Leading in to his contrast between Czech and English sentences,

11
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 a
‘long duration’.
34. Let us reconsider in this light the organization of language into ‘levels’ (cf. § 7). The
characteristic 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, as
suggested 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 by
this 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 the
components of morphemes, the morphemes the components of words, and the words the
components of phrases (cf. Bloomfield 1933: 162). Hence, the whole scheme was held
together by a ratio of parts to wholes, even though the criteria for defining the respective
types 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 the
straightforward 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 stating
what those meanings are (cf. § 6ff, 14).
35. A characteristic functionalist scheme, in contrast, might have levels such as
‘intonation’ 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

12
sounds. The ‘lexicogrammar’ includes not just the morphemes and the phrase structures,
but their cognitive grounding in the community’s system of world-knowledge about how
processes and their participants are organized, e.g. whether an Action (e.g. ‘accept a
settlement’) has a Human Agent (cf. § 19, 67) (cf. Longacre 1976; Halliday 1985). And
‘discourse’ is the total communicative event, including gestures, facial expressions,
emotional displays, and so on. These levels are interrelated not through size and
constituency, but through mutually determining
functions, 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 the means which serve the ends of the other levels.
36. This idea can be insightfully applied also to the more familiar scheme of descriptive
‘levels’ in order to characterize their relations to each other and to meaning. As shown in
Table 3 (up to down axis on the left side),

the levels whose units are typically but not obligatorily smaller are the means for the ends
of 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 the
means for the ends of the meanings on the levels whose units are typically but not
obligatorily larger (up to down axis on the right side).
37. This formulation seems well-suited to the precepts of pioneering functionalists. We
can recall here Firth’s pronouncement that ‘descriptive’ or ‘structural linguistics’ should
‘deal with meaning throughout the whole range of the discipline’ and ‘at all levels of
analysis’ (1968: 50, 160). We can also recall Pike’s warning that ‘the sharp-cut
segmentation of meanings’ is ‘in principle impossible’: ‘meaning has its locus not in the
individual 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 component
of the entire complex’ and ‘occurs only as a function of a total behavioural event in a total
social matrix’ (1967: 148f, 609). Pike’s view might help resolve such ‘difficulties’ as arise
when ‘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 universe
of discourse’ (1967: 599).

13
 38. In the functionalist scheme, relations or ratios of size and constituency are not
decisive, 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 that
so 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 the
stretches of discourse that participants actually process, whose length and complexity are
decided on line by ‘packaging and scheduling strategies’ (see § 44 below) rather than
defined a priori by the units of formal linguistic analysis. For the wherewithal of spoken
sounds to be sufficiently distinctive to be reliably produced and received, the phonemes
supply targets around which the variations of actual uttered and heard speech are clustered
while current contextual constraints ensure that mistakes or miscues happen fairly seldom
and endanger communication even more seldom. To enable distinctions among the
differing functions of the same word-base (e.g. the stem of a Verb), a language is highly
likely (though not forced) to work with means whose formal signals consist of
modifications or expansions of the base; so the morphemes get organized into modest
‘frozen islands’ whose borders are stable enough that many cases can be handled with
compact resources, e.g. the Arabic ‘broken’ or ‘internal’ plural that modifies the form
versus 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 the
internal plural like ‘film - aflaam’ (film/s) and some with the suffixed plural like
‘tilifizyoon - tilifizyoonat’ (television/s), depending on whether the word happens to
resemble 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 distinct
combinable 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 draw
upon these resources as suits the current context. So such questions as how much of the
formal arranging of sentences is done by the syntax or by the semantics (§ 20) are
unanswerable 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 notions
of ‘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 more
marked the options, the more they would tend to involve express momentary ‘freezing’.

14
The effort of producing and receiving them would depend on this factor rather than on
frequencies 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 planets

In evil mixture to disorder wander [...]
Fights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure! (Troilus and Cressida I, iii, 94-101)

the combinations are strikingly marked, e.g. the ‘married calm of states’; yet we can
comprehend the meaning (i.e. that ‘disorder’ follows when ‘the speciality of rule hath been
neglected’, 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 native
speakers to instantiate a ‘grammatical sentence’ of the language, it is the output channeled
predominantly, though (aside from standing clichés like ‘no man is an island’) not
exclusively, from frozen islands and their immediate vicinity (§ 46). So we do not have a
clean contrast between yes-or-no or between ‘grammatical’ versus ‘ungrammatical’ unless
we 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 but
rather its claims to be the exclusive source and statement of categories, criteria, and
constraints. Our leading criteria cannot be formality and rigour as ends in themselves, but
empirically and computationally supportable descriptions of how a language as a complex
system 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 that
the 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’ and
‘selection’ (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

15
[ed.] 1989; Stein [ed.] 1989; Langton et al. [eds.] 1992; Zurek [ed.] 1990) and suggest
significant principles for the new foundations of a science of text and discourse as well
(Beaugrande, in preparation). We might thereby explicitly resituate linguistics among the
other sciences after a long tradition of either fending off presumed encroachments (as in
Saussure’s claims cited in § 2) or making sporadic or sketchy borrowings, e.g. comparing a
‘grammar’ that ‘generates all grammatically “possible” utterances’ with a ‘chemical theory’
that ‘generates all physically possible compounds’ (Chomsky 1957: 48)
43. As an evolving complex system, language would operate not directly with standing
‘rules’ but with powerful packaging and scheduling strategies that select some ‘rules’
from a standing repertory (e.g. that the English Article precedes the Noun) and generate
other ‘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 in
some workable order, sometimes in sequence and sometimes in parallel. These strategies
can freely derive constraints from reality (e.g. that winds are unprofitable to chase) and
from society (e.g. that uttering grammatically incomplete sentences can hardly be a prison
offense) (examples from § 21).
44. The most powerful constraints would therefore apply not directly to the
sentence as a sequence of syntactic categories, as formalist linguists have consistently
assumed, but rather to the design processes which aretuning the ‘current version’ of the
language and generating those constraints needed for the ongoing communicative context.
Formalist linguists have, as it were, been looking too far ‘downstream’ for ‘shallow’
constraints on the sentence itself; but these cannot reveal the working of the system until we
uncover the ‘deeper’ constraints ‘upstream’ that are charged with specifying constraints at
varying degrees of ‘shallowness’, including those addressed by formalism as well as those
above 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 modest
‘inner 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 means
of operations for search, activation, and regulation of linkages among items in patterns. The
‘rules’ about which linguists do attain consensus would come from that inner set, while the
‘rules’ which remain in dispute would come from the outer zones (cf. § 40). So what we
might take to be an abstract or formal linguistic ‘rule’ describing a formal ‘sentence
structure’ would actually be a commonplace selection or output of operations that fluctuate
to suit the motivations and organizational demands of the context. The notion that such
motivations 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’

16
have no organization amenable to complete or definitive empirical discovery and
description, much less to a definitive formalization. Only a fully developed functional
framework 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 offers
an 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 recent
research on ‘priming’ (e.g. Kintsch 1988, 1989). A probe item is held to be primed — its
level of activation is raised above the inactive state — if people consistently recognize and
respond 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, the
initial association among a word and its possible meanings was surprisingly found to be not
merely non-determinate but non-selective! So when people are reading a given word in a
text, both its relevant and its non-relevant meanings are initially ‘primed’ and activated; but
after 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 reading
a text, on a moving computer display, containing the passage:

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

The text suddenly halts at ‘mint’, and the display gives you a target item to decide if it’s a
real word. For a brief interval up to roughly half a second, your response will probably
show 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 strength
whereby any one word or meaning is associated with the current ‘control centres’ of the
topic.
47. The importance of this finding can hardly be overestimated. The resulting
‘construction-integration model’ is distinguished case of a major theoretical revision driven
directly 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 just
constructed 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 the
‘nodes’ 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 same
network. The now active network (suggested by right-hand graphic of figure 2 in § 26) runs
through several cycles whereby the strengths of the connections are adjusted, some being
raised and others lowered; and which adjustments occur is evidently determined by the
constraints of the context. Here, linguistics and semantics would frame the leading
question: what sort of rules could possibly be skilled and rapid enough to do the job? And

17
how could they be called up and applied if, at (or near) the split second when they are
needed, the processor has not resolved ambiguous word senses?
48. The answers may lie in a striking parallel that has come to the fore in ‘complexity
theory’, 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 details
and sources). The most rudimentary requirements for ‘self-organizing processes’ have been
studied in research on the ‘cellular automaton’, a self-operating mechanism embodying a
‘programmable universe’ wherein time is ‘ticked off’ by a ‘cosmic clock’ and space is filled
with an arrangement of discrete ‘cells’, each of which can be in only one of a fixed
repertory of states, say, either living or dead (compare Burks 1970). With each tick of the
clock, this automaton makes a transition to a new state determined by its own current state
and the current state of its neighbors. The ‘laws’ of such a universe can be encoded in a
‘transition table’ stating the ‘rules’ for changing from any current state to a possible
consequent 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 rules
specified by the programmer (see Wolfram 1984; Wolfram [ed.] (1986). The simulations
uncovered 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 you
start 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 rules
have a single ‘point attractor’, like a marble rolling around in a basin: wherever it started it
would soon roll down and stop in the centre. Class 2 are ‘stagnation rules’ whereby the
initial 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 grid
on the screen appears to be boiling with a ‘chaos’ (in an ordinary sense) of structures so
unpredictable and unstable that they break up almost as soon as they form. In dynamical
systems, these rules have a set of ‘strange attractors’, like a marble rolling around in a bowl
so fast and furiously that it can never settle down. Finally, Class 4 are ‘self-organizing
rules’ that produce an ‘order’ of structures which multiply, grow, split, and recombine in
coherent patterns but don’t ever fully settle down. These rules, which have no correlated

18
‘attractor’ in the theory of dynamical systems, seem the most similar to the basic principles
that could construct life-systems and their processes and in fact generate patterns quite
reminiscent, 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 straightforward
‘survival probability’, i.e. the likelihood that any given cell would be alive in the next
‘generation’ ticked off the ‘clock’ (shown in Table 1). A probability near 0 goes with
‘doomsday rules’, and everything dies off almost at once. A somewhat higher probability
goes with ‘stagnation rules’, and things survive but in stasis. A 50-50 probability goes with
‘chaotic rules’, and each cell switches constantly from life to death and back, so that
nothing 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 there
too, some mode of ‘self-organization’ must be at work, and that its key feature is again the
regulation of critical values, as has in fact been simulated on computers by Kintsch’s 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 building
up the array of knowledge that corresponds to the ‘meaning’ of the discourse as the
construct of the receiver (here the reader), and not as the output of ‘shallow rules’ called up
to map out specific ‘phrase structures’, ‘transform’ them into others, and to ‘interpret’ the
result by pasting together the meanings of the constituent formal pieces. The simulations by
the Kintsch group in Colorado and the group around David Rumelhart and James
McClelland in California indicate that an associative network can support a coherent array
of text meaning (Kintsch’s ‘textbase’) by adjusting strengths of linkage in a ‘connectionist’
manner (cf. Rumelhart & McClelland 1986). Here, ‘concepts are defined in a knowledge
net by meaning constructed from their position in the net; immediate associates and
semantic neighbors of a node constitute its core meaning’, whereas ‘its complete and full
meaning’ 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 in
comprehension 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

19
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 discourse
‘environments characterized by almost infinite variability’ (ibid.). So ‘a computational
model of text comprehension’ as ‘the construction of a mental representation of a text with
simple, though rough and crude rules’ being ‘used promiscuously’, followed by ‘a wholistic
integration phase’ that produces ‘a coherent picture’, would seem to be ‘psychologically
more plausible and computationally more flexible’ than the ‘precise rules’ that classical
semantics has envisioned (Kintsch 1992: 263).
52. Computers have also made a significant advance in a different direction but again
indicating that relatively few constraints (universal ‘frozen islands’) apply all across the
language as an abstract system. The majority apply rather to discourse domains or contexts,
some sparser, some richer. These contexts, which have largely remained implicit in
ostensibly formal analysis (§ 4), can now be systematically described through huge
computerized corpuses of real language data, such as the ‘Bank of English’ at the
Birmingham 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 from
797 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 reveal
regularities that simply aren’t evident either from modest samples or from introspection of
native speakers (Sinclair 1992a, b). The question of how general a given regularity might be
is no longer a matter of intuition subtly biased by a vested interest in situating things on the
highest plane (§ 5, 17, 33). Instead, it is a matter to be verified by looking at sets of contexts
in which key words appear more often or less often, and at the phrasings which frequently
link certain word-types.
53. An interesting case in point is the Verb ‘build up’. If used in the Active as a
Productive Process with a Human Agent as Subject and with a Target, the corpus
collocations show an ameliorative attitude (e.g. when ‘you build up an organisation’); used
in the Medial with a non-human Subject as Developmental Process and no Target, the
collocations 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 as
‘subjective’, ‘vague’, or simply ‘extralinguistic’.
54. Admittedly, the display of data by no means eliminates the need for careful
interpretation 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 about
whether things involved with ‘building up’ are good or bad. But such a display of data is
the surest basis I can see for regaining convergence and consensus about the nature and the
extent 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

20
be a fine opportunity for reconsidering how to build functional theories and methods closely
attuned 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 the
majority position. The shift has been driven largely by problems thrown up by conventional
formalist 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 justify
some optimism that within the framework of discourse and discourse processing we can
find theories and models of language that attain impressive degrees of rigour and formality
without remaining bound to the ‘classical’ programme of ‘mainstream’ linguistics
summarized 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 set
of hypotheses like these:

(1a) A language should be considered a fluctuating and evolving system moving from
one activated version to another.
(2a) Language constitutes a communicative system defined by internal and external
criteria.
(3a) Language is a phenomenon integrated with many other domains of human
knowledge or activity.
(4a) The language should be described in respect to variations due to time, place, or
identity of speakers.
(5a) The description of a language should be couched in statements at 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 by
admitting 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 all
available 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 in
formalist linguistics. I shall wind up by citing twelve prospects we can foresee. First, we
will 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

21
and ameliorative speaker attitudes cited in § 54 will need to be admitted as a valid
constraint.
58. Second, we can expect a critical reappraisal of seemingly secure principles of
linguistics. A prominent instance here is the venerable distinction between the grammar as
a 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 the
grammar 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 a
considerable number of lexical items have distinctive grammatical proclivities; and
conversely, 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 to reconsider our familiar divisions that
parcel out language into ‘levels’ (or ‘components’’). Whereas the characteristic formalist
scheme had levels defined by the units of ‘langue’ and related in terms of size and
constituency displays, the functionalist scheme sees the levels related to each other and to
the types of meaning in terms of means and ends (cf. § 35-38). The ‘mapping’ between
means and ends is only secondarily executed in terms of forms and patterns and is
substantially more adaptive and non-deterministic than the mapping between parts and
wholes.
60. Fourth, we will need to officially discard the ‘langue/parole’
dichotomy descended from Saussure — a move already prefigured by functionalists (Trnka
1964; 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 most
interesting new statements we can make about language will be those showing how an
English text or discourse is a dialectic that reconciles the two Saussurian poles: some
aspects are more general for the language at large and some are specific to the single
situation. To tell which is which, we need no longer rely on intuitions or follow our vested
interest 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 to
whether and how they indicate what brings the process about. This suggest beside the
familiar distinction between Active and Passive, where the Agent is more likely to be
explicit for the first than the second, a large class of Medials wherein the Agent in the
‘medium’ 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 classes
traditionally called ‘Intransitive Copulative’ and Intransitive Complete’.
62. Sixth, we might explore why some functional categories are more typically
expressed in some formal patterns rather than others. The English Imperative is among

22
the clearest indicators of Process types, apparently because it has remained relatively
unaffected by the diversification of social roles following the rise of the middle and
working classes, during which more indirect and adaptable means of command and request
were derived instead from Modal Verb constructions, Interrogatives, and so on. Here, we
might 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. More
specifically, the prototypical Emotives in English do not make the Agent the controlling
Medium but a Medium in a vaguely controlled State expressed as a Modifier with a Verb
like ‘be’ and ‘feel’, e.g. ‘be happy’ and ‘feel sad’.6 For social motives, the unmarked
Imperatives are Positive with the Ameliorative Aspect, e.g. ‘be happy!’, but Negative with
the Pejorative Aspect, e.g. ‘don’t feel sad!’ (Beaugrande, in prep.). Conversely, these
Imperatives 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 the
classical mainstream programme that (in terms of the ‘layer-cake’ parable, § 24f) sought to
detach language from its role of a mediating system interposed between ‘reality’ and
‘society’ on the deeper (‘u-s-a’) hypothesis that once detached, the language system will
stand (compare § 3, 26). In contrast, the hypothesis just cited about English Imperatives
could lead to social and cultural research on the typical strategies for giving commands. In a
‘pre-modern’ culture with firm beliefs in the power of ritual magic to affect the weather, a
command like ‘sun, ripen our crops!’ might be unmarked in a ritual context, whereas in a
‘modern Western society it might seem childish or facetious. In such respects, large-corpus
data will often suggest hypotheses that lead the statement of function constraints
toward cultural contexts.
64. Eighth, the foregoing prospects might open new horizons for cross-cultural
studies, provided that similar empirical tests and large corpuses could be carried out for
other languages besides English. In mainstream linguistics, the common demand that
‘grammatical description’ should ‘recognize only those linguistic distinctions which are
formally expressed’ (stipulated even by Firth 1957a [1951]: 222) has been offset somewhat
by the accumulation of languages in which these distinctions are quite diverse, witness
Bloomfield’s (1933: 176) ‘surprise sentence’ and ‘disappointment sentence’ accredited
because they are formally signalled in Menomini though not in English. The accumulation
has made linguists sensitive to a wide range of functional categories, even if demands like
Firth’s have made them wary about going beyond the formal classes of the individual
language. It is surely no coincidence that the pioneers in British ‘functional’ research, such
as Firth and Halliday, were Orientalists who urgently needed functional categories to
describe languages like Chinese or Hindustani. We can not turn again to languages like
English with a sharpened sense for functions that are not formally signalled but are no less
vital, e.g the intonation contours that reliably convey surprise and disappointment.
65. Ninth, new approaches will require a theoretical superstructure in keeping with
a stated cognitive interest, simply because we cannot master such a volume and variety of

23
data and aspects without setting clear priorities (Beaugrande, in preparation). A theory
tailored 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 foreign
language (‘EFL’). In the former case, the overall tendencies shown by a large corpus will be
less 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 be
adjusted to the culture of the prospective learners and to the discourse strategies of the
native 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 by
functional criteria.
66. Tenth, whereas formal analysis is usually considered finished when it has attained
an exhaustive segmentation of the data or rewritten them all into formal notation and state
rules that ‘assign a structural description’, a functional analysis would elect to stop when it
has attained ‘ecological validity’ by providing some relevant and non-trivial insight
into discursive practices, e.g. how some discourse strategies make knowledge more
widely accessible than others (Beaugrande, 1991b, 1991c, in prep.) and how strategies
might support equality among participants and bring practices of inequality to heightened
awareness (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 make
knowledge more widely accessible (cf. Halliday and Martin 1993). Striving for such
‘ecological 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 the
top 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 a
careful differentiation if we want to apply our research to such issues as improved reading
and writing programs (cf. Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987; Čmerjková and Šticha [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 the
formulas of predicate calculus, upon which rules can easily act because they are written in
much the same notation. According to my line of argument, this act means freezing the
data, on the untested assumption that they are reliably maintained within the system in a
frozen state. Insofar as the freezing also sheds contextual constraints, it defeats rather than
advances the search for a complete, definitive analysis and undermines convergence and
consensus. It seems more productive to retain the text or discourse as its own
representation in some orthography whose use favours convergence and consensus, and
apply clearly stated strategies of description, analysis, and explanation, such as a ‘cognitive
functional grammar’ situated close to semantic and pragmatic concerns (cf. Halliday 1985:

24
xvif) (§ 35, 61). These strategies place the method in a ‘user-friendly’ proximity to the data
yet ensure that it does not converge with them.
68. Twelfth, functional approaches can offer the new labours they bring by offering
some decided advantages. They will be eminently 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 be much more user-friendly, since no special training
would 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 everyday
discourse 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 terms
‘classical’ and ‘mainstream linguistics’ are used here merely heuristically for
conventional notions which were either stated in central works and frequently cited from
these 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 sound
units 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), the
former 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 enlisted
in constraining the analysis without sufficient awareness of the implications (cf. § 15).
3
An egregious case was Dressler’s (1970) attack on the Prague School, taking it as given
that 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 with
concordances’ 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 terms
for Processes and Aspects from the ‘cognitive functional grammar’ set forth in
Beaugrande (1997), which draws on and modifies such functional grammars as Halliday
(1985); compare Chafe’s (1970) ‘semantic structure’ and Longacre’s (1976) ‘notional
structure’.

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