A Formalist’s Reading of Some Functionalist Work in Syntax

In terms of social groups, “formalist” syntacticians are roughly those who follow some variant of the program of Generative Grammar (Principles & Parameters, LFG, HPSG, Minimalism, etc.). Their analyses tend to be based on assumptions of Modularity (including the “Autonomy of Syntax” as a special case) and categoriality, among other principles. In more general terms, however, it can be argued that “formalism” simply consists in a commitment to fully explicit formulations cashing out one’s intuitions about the structure of language in terms that require as little as possible in the way of unanalyzed contributions by an understanding reader: surely a ‘motherhood’ issue that could not plausibly differentiate theoretical views. “Functionalists,” typically, are those who argue for a higher degree of involvement of other domains (semantics, pragmatics, discourse, extra-linguistic exigencies deriving from the context of communication, etc.) in syntactic phenomena, and for hierarchies, gradients, and other non-categorial analyses. I argue, however, that the practice of many functionalist syntacticians generally trades heavily on a relatively low degree of explicitness and on pre-systematic, intuitive understandings of the categories of an analysis. When functionalist arguments against modularity, or in favor of hierarchical scales as opposed to discrete categories are examined closely, they often break down on just the basis that they involve assumptions about the unity of domains of fact that are better seen as the product of distinct interacting systems. The activity of examining functionalist arguments in this way is often quite instructive, but not always in the direction their formulators might