The Role of Abstraction in Syntax: From a Functionalist Perspective

Abstract

In the area of syntax, the notion of abstraction has been employed differently in the two major theoretical approaches of functionalist and formalist models. From the functional perspective, a typologically adequate linguistic model needs to look at universals without imposing too much abstraction on principles or representation. In contrast, the formalist model has been characterized by its tendency towards stating language universals in terms of abstract structures and principles. This paper argues that while these two traditionally opposing tendencies remain true, the difference between the functionalist and formalist models is the degree of abstraction, not a dichotomy of presence and absence of such a property. Functionalists also rely on a certain degree of abstraction in describing language depending on various functional-cognitive models within this approach. This paper also shows that the direction of Spanish functional syntax has been diverse and rich, employing a varying degree of abstraction of representation of language. The prediction for the future of the functionalist and formalist models is their eventual realignment, a process that may compromise their respective meaning-centered and the formcentered positions. Functionalist and formalist views on language universals and abstract principles and representation of languageThe issue of how much a description of a language can be abstract has had a long tradition of debate in linguistics, and especially in the area of syntax. The notion of abstraction, or more precisely, the degree of abstraction can be defined as the distance between underlying structures of language and the surface linguistic representations that manifest them. The discussion about the role of abstraction has evolved around the different views on language universals, that is, the ways by which one can generalize knowledge of language. The most salient point of departure for such a debate starts around the mid fifties when the work of Joseph H. Greenberg (1957) as well as Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957) (and later, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax [1965]) came out around the same time. While the Chomskyan approach emerged partly as a reaction against post-Bloomfieldian structuralism that had been prevalent until then, the two positions of Greenberg