Since the 1970s functionalism has been attached to a variety of movements and models making major contributions to linguistic theory. Over the past decades it has gained more ground, and we now have a substantial body of literature from various perspectives making a positive impact on the field of linguistics. This collection of papers brings leading scholars in this area together to provide recognition to the impact of functionalism on current linguistic theory highlighting its nature as a leading force within linguistics and beyond and defining its current and future directions.

• Contents
• Introduction
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 The Volume Papers
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
• On the Intellectual Roots of Functionalism in Linguistics
  • 1 Antiquity
  • 2 Middle Ages to the 19th Century
  • 3 The 19th Century
  • 4 Structuralism
  • 5 Chomsky
  • 6 The 1970’s pragmatic synthesis
  • References
• Functional Explanation and its Uses
  • 1 Preliminary Remarks
  • 2 Explaining the Zero in Verb Morphology
  • 3 Explaining Grammatical Asymmetries and Hierarchies
  • 4 Explaining Grammaticalization
  • 5 Additional Examples of Typological Explanation
  • 6 Explanations: From Typological via Teleological to Rational
  • 7 Sense-Perception and Its Complementary Notions: Introspection < Empathy < Intuition
  • 8 In Which Sense Do Typological Explanations Qualify as Functional?
  • 9 What Other Types of Explanation May Be Needed?
  • 10 Conclusion
  • References
• Structure and Function: A Niche-Constructional Approach
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Linguistics and evolutionary theory
  • 3 The structuralist-functionalist dichotomies – in the light of nicheconstructional evolution
  • 4 Conclusion
  • References
• Toward a Thought-Based Linguistics
  • 1 Language function
  • 2 Looking through the wrong end of the telescope
  • 3 What are thoughts anyway?
  • 4 Two views of language design
  • 5 Thought structure
  • 6 From thoughts to a semantic structure
  • 7 From semantics to syntax
  • 8 From syntax to phonology and sounds
  • 9 Thought and language as a continuous flow
  • 10 Does language shape thoughts?
  • 11 Interdisciplinary convergence
  • 12 Summary
  • References
• Changing Language
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Syntactic Adaptations
  • 3 Phonological Adaptations
  • 4 What Kind of Learning System?
  • 5 Concluding Remarks
  • References
• An Outline of Discourse Grammar
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Discourse Grammar
  • 3 The two main domains of DG
  • 4 The categories of TG
  • 5 Non-restrictive meaning and the situation of discourse
  • 6 Cooptation
  • 7 Types of theticals
  • 8 Earlier accounts
  • 9 Conclusions
  • Abbreviations
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Towards an Experimental Functional Linguistics: Production
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Why do experiments?
  • 3 Why study production?
  • 4 The observer’s paradox and the ‘design space’ of functional language production experiments
  • 5 Beyond recipient design: Strategies, choices, and brain-traps
  • 6 Two things that functional linguists need to know about how the brain works: Lexical and structural priming
  • 7 Experiments and their design
  • 8 Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Index