Functionality in grammar design

The implementation of the Scandinavian Grammar Matrix gave rise to a number of methodological and theoretical discussions about the desiderata for a formal theory of natural language grammar. In this paper, a strong hypothesis of the functionality of grammar is presented. Functionality is imposed on constraintbased grammars, on their lexicons and on the grammars themselves. It is demonstrated how this radically reduces complexity, i.e. the recognition problem is in ptime. Certain aspects of the hypothesis are motivated by methodological and psycholinguistic considerations too. The implementation employs underspecification techniques, type inference and some amount of constructional specification.