The two basic approaches to linguistics are the formalist and the functionalist approaches. In this engaging monograph, Frederick J. Newmeyer, a formalist, argues that both approaches are valid. However, because formal and functional linguists have avoided direct confrontation, they remain unaware of the compatability of their results. One of the author's goals is to make each side accessible to the other. While remaining an ardent formalist, Newmeyer stresses the limitations of a narrow formalist outlook that refuses to consider that anything of interest might have been discovered in the course of functionalist-oriented research. He argues that the basic principles of generative grammar, in interaction with principles in other linguistic domains, provide compelling accounts of phenomena that functionalists have used to try to refute the generative approach. Bradford Books imprint

A number of disparate approaches to language, ranging from cognitive linguistics to stochastic implementations of optimality theory, have challenged the classical distinction between knowledge of language and use of language. Supporters of such approaches point to the functional motivation of grammatical structure, language users' sensitivity to the frequency of occurrence of grammatical elements, and the great disparity between sentences that grammars generate and speakers' actual utterances. In this article I defend the classical position, and provide evidence from a number of sources that speakers mentally represent full grammatical structure, however fragmentary their utterances might be. The article also questions the relevance of most corpus-based frequency and probability studies to models of individual grammatical competence. I propose a scenario for the origins and evolution of language that helps to explain why grammar and usage are as distinct as they are.

The dominant position among generative grammarians with respect to typological variation is that it should be captured by parameters, which are either directly tied to principles of Universal Grammar (UG) or to functional projections provided by UG. Parameter-setting approaches, however, have failed to live up to their promise. They should be replaced by a model in which language-particular rules take over the work of parameter settings and in which most typological variation follows from independently-needed principles of performance. In such a model, UG specifies the class of possible languages, but not the set of probable languages.

A theme running through much of the functionalist literature in linguistics is that grammatical structure, to a considerable degree, has an 'iconic' motivation. This theme can be distilled into three rather distinct claims: (1) iconic principles govern speakers' choices of structurally available options in discourse; (2) structural options that reflect discourse-iconic principles become grammaticalized; (3) grammatical structure is an iconic reflection of conceptual structure. After presenting numerous examples from the functionalist literature in support of the idea that iconicity is widespread in language, I argue that claim (1) is irrelevant to generative grammar; claim (2), if correct, poses no challenge to generative grammar, despite a widespread belief to the contrary; and claim (3) has literally been built into standard versions of generative grammar. I go on to discuss the implications of iconic relations in language for the autonomy hypothesis and, at a more speculative level, for the evolution of language.

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