Page 41 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

Givón (1979:6) alleges the history of transformational-generative linguistics of
'boiling down to nothing but a blatant attempt to represent the formalism as "theory,"

to assert that "it predicts a range of facts," that "it makes empirical claims," and that it
somehow "explains." It further mentions that Chomsky's TG model makes no
reference to explanation of any kind, it is rather Bloomfieldian in ignoring the natural

explanatory parameters of language, and rather Harrisian in motivating the formalism
purely on the grounds of simplicity-economy in the name of explanation.

Givón (1979:44) blames TG grammar of combining theoretical vacuity of
empiricism and the empirical irresponsibility of rationalism and further mentions that if

the study of language, in Chomsky's view, must play in elucidating the nature of human
cognition and human behaviour, it must be rejected as a pseudo-theory and useless

methodology. It is so because neurological and cognitive development has outpaced
socio-cultural development and the functional and adaptive necessities imposed by ––
and mediated through –– the socio-cultural environment (Givón 1979:290).

According to Cristofaro (2003:7), the functional theories "seek to account for
language structure in terms of language function". Givón (2001a:2) quotes Halliday

(1973:7) clearly defining the functional approach to language as follows:
A functional approach to language means, first of all, investigating how

language is used: trying to find out what are the purposes that language serves
for us, and how we are able to achieve these purposes through speaking and

listening, reading and writing. But it also means more than this. It means
seeking to explain the nature of language in functional terms: seeking whether
language itself has been shaped by use, and if so, in what ways–how the form

of language has been determined by the function it has evolved to serve
The functional linguists consider language as a means of human

communication. They believe that all the natural languages have infinite number of
pragmatic functions to be performed with the limited number of linguistic structures.
Therefore "roughly-the-same propositional semantic contents can be packaged into a

wide array of different syntactic clause-types" (Givón 2001a:17), and several pragmatic
functions can be accomplished by the same formal structure. "This is where the clause-

in-isolation method becomes unreliable and must be supplemented with the study of
grammar in its natural communicative context" (Givón 2001a:18). The task of a

linguist, according to this perspective, is aimed at explaining the relation between forms
and functions of the language and analyzing how functions shape the grammatical

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