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1 results

  • 12 - Language evolution

  • from Part II - Process and formation
  • Edited by N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman, Yale University, Connecticut, Jack Sidnell, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology
    Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    11 September 2014, pp 309-324

  • Summary

    This chapter overviews scholarship in functional linguistics, and focuses on constituency, a specific problem which has attracted significant attention from functionalists. It examines constituency from the perspective of a natural outgrowth of functionalism in linguistics, namely a concern with the function of grammar in its ecological habitat, conversational interaction. Functional approaches to patterning in language, then, have recently shifted the focus away from synchrony to diachrony and grammaticization. The chapter explores the role of constituent schemas in allowing conversational interactants to produce and monitor turns at talk for their trajectories and what it might take for them to be finished. It discusses three ways in which constituency works to help speakers manage interactional tasks. The operations of projection, expansion, and retraction are first and foremost interactional tasks, for which constituent schemas afford a solution.