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The Functional Perspective on Language and Discourse: Applications and implications
Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco Gonzálvez-García and Angela Downing
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 247] 2014
► pp. 19–36

Developing comprehensive criteria of adequacy

The challenge of hybridity

Butler (2009a, b) argues that an adequate model of the language system should accommodate cognitive, sociocultural, discoursal, acquisitional, typological and diachronic dimensions, and observational evidence from corpora, experiments and intuition. This paper asks if such reconciliation is possible. It argues that language is composed of accreted subsystems that render the linguistic system inherently complex in each dimension. This hybridity explains the difficulty in constructing Butler’s macro-model, but also indicates how it might be done. Subsystems that add complexity in one dimension are often explained by another, e.g. sub-patterns for English plural formation arose for sociocultural reasons (Classical borrowing); typological exception groups (e.g. Director General) have a diachronic explanation. Thus, future modelling will benefit from the flexibility to cross-refer between dimensions.

Published online: 16 May 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.247.02wra
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Butler, Christopher S.
2019. Does functional linguistics have a ‘fundamental unity’?. Functions of Language 26:1 ► pp. 64 ff. DOI logo

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