Functionalism

In linguistics, functionalism is best seen as a particular movement within

structuralism. It is a reaction against the formal linguistics theories that began
with Saussurean structuralism in the early 1900s. It is characterized by the belief
that the phonological, grammatical and semantic structure of languages is
determined by the functions that they have to perform in the societies in which they
operate. The best known representative of functionalism is the Prague School in
the period preceding the Second World War.
Functionalism refers to the study of the form of language in reference to their social
its social function in communication. It considers the individual as a social being
and investigates the way in which she/he acquires language and uses it in order to
communicate with others in her or his social environment.
Functionalism criticizes Chomskys nativism and computability of the rules which
list grammatical sentences. For functional analysis, the importance of the
interpretation of texts is noted, so it is designed to explain how language is used in
context and in the interpretation of the language system. The key components of
language meaning express basic functions:
represent the world to interact with others.
It is also used for functional analysis interpretation of linguistic elements due
to that each item is explained by their role in the whole language system
used in the text under analysis, both spoken and written.
At the theoretical level, functional studies of language have the same starting point: a
vision that could be described as instrumentalist. According to this view, every
language has the primary purpose of communication and, therefore, the aim should be
the starting point for any linguistic study is made. Therefore, the basic question to
solve is to verify how users communicate a particular language. This involves analyzing
not only the forms or grammatical structures, but also all the communicative situation:
the event, the participants, the discursive context. In this, the US is opposed to
functionalism structuralism and formalist theories. in the first, grammatical structures
such as phonemes, morphemes, syntactic and semantic relationships, constituents,
dependencies, etc. are analyzed The second analyzed these phenomena and, in turn,
build a formal language model. Functionalists argue that motivated communicative
situation explains and determines the grammar structures; thus, its purpose is not to
present models, but to find explanations

In general, we can say that functionalism in linguistics has tended to emphasize

the instrumental character of language. And the functionalism maintains that the
structure of natural languages is determined by the several interdependent
semiotic functions- expressive, social and descriptive.