ABSTRACT
Thelastdecadeshavewitnessedastronginterestintheoriesof enonciation,and,atadeeperlevel,amoveawayfromagrammarfocusedapproachtowardacommunication-centeredone.2Intwo recentbooks,Hagege(1982,1985)hasintegratedthelattertypeof approachintoageneraltheoryoflanguage,relatingittoan"enunciativehierarchicalpointofview."Thiscontrastswithamorphosyntactic pointofview,whichfocusesonformal(includingpositional)and functionalaspectsoflinguisticunitsabovethephoneme-level.By "function"weunderstandhere"internalfunction,"thusareference totherelationoflinguisticunitstothelanguagesystem.Insuchaview "function"canbeopposedto"use."(Onecouldalsospeakof function1andfunction2,thelatterreferringthentotherelation betweenlanguageunitsandlanguageusers.3)
Thegrammaticaltraditionhaslargelyeschewedusage-baseddefinitionsoflinguisticunitsonthemorphosyntacticlevel.Whilethismay beduetoanawareness(neverexplicitlyacknowledged)thatformand function(i.e.function1)allowonetodefinelinguisticunitsinamuch moreoperationalway,onemightwellwonderwhetherthissituationis notduetoa"subordinative"attitudeonthepartofgrammarians, whooftenprefer(orpreferred)towalkinthefootstepsoflogicians andlanguagepedagogueswhohaveinsistedonformalandcontentbasedclassificatorycriteria.Thisisnottheproperplacetoembark uponabroad-gaugedinvestigationofastrikinginertiainthehistory oflinguistics.Howeverseveralobservationsarerelevantinthiscontext:
(a)theremarkablelongevityoftheparts-of-speechapproach(cf. SwiggersandVanHoecke1986),whichisstilladopted,without question,invariousmoderntheoriesofgrammar;
(b) the narrow conception of syntax adhered to throughout the history of linguistics. If one excludes certain rare intrusions of rhetorical theory into the field of grammar,4 the prevailing conceptions of syntax can be reduced to a functional explanation of inflectional markers or to an account of word combinations in terms of "rules and principles. " 5 It is almost an irony of the history of grammar that, although much has been written about linguistic competence (with special reference to "syntactic knowledge"), syntactic theory never raised, let alone answered, the question: "Why do people (mostly) speak in sentences?"
