ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the main tenets of a functionalist approach to grammar. It shows how extremely compatible this approach is with cognitive neuropsychology. The chapter focuses on surveying the place of grammar within the human knowledge-representation and communication system. It asserts that the human language combines two major mega-functions: representation of knowledge; communication of represented knowledge. Functionalism in Biology harkens back to Aristotle, who more or less single-handedly dislodged the two structuralist schools that had dominated Greek biological thought up to his time. Both schools sought to understand live organisms in terms of, purely, their structure, the way they understood inorganic matter. The well-coded human communicative system combines a number of distinct modules that can be divided, broadly, into two sub-systems: The cognitive representation system; the communicative code system. The chapter further explores how empirical psycholinguistics and functionally and cognitively oriented linguistics can, rather naturally, constrain and illuminate each other.
