Anthropology Times

Functional Theories of Grammar
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 13: 97-117 (Volume publication date October 1984)
J Nichols
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

This article is for functional theories of grammar what I would like to have for anthropology generally. It lays outs the basics and then goes through a list of all the players, their perspectives, and their works. I enjoyed Nichols’ careful use of words, the pain she takes to explain exactly her use of the word “functional” in the text of this article and how the use of that word might differ across texts and perspectives. I’ve found it difficult lately to tear myself away from my math and science, physics, and chemistry review. I did not give this article the attention I would have liked given how nicely comprehensive it was even though under 20 pages. The use of jargon was not too heavy, but it was present beyond my immediate abilities.

Still I felt a kinship reading it as the approach seems of the type I took toward conversation as a child. About functional grammar Nichols writes: “It analyzes grammatical structure, as do formal and structural grammar; but it also analyzes the entire communicative situation: the purpose of the speech event, its participants, its discourse context.” I used to spend a lot of time observing how people used words in different situations, how context and mood and participants affected word choices. I would take these observations into account when formulating verbal responses. I especially took note of the extra communicative elements that were indicated by the choice of words, but didn’t necessarily follow from the dictionary definitions of the words. As a result, I tended to have a longer than usual pause before responding, and I tended to speak slowly even by Southern standards.

Starting some time in college, I made efforts to be more natural in conversational pace and style. In the process I lost a lot of the observation skills I had gained. Unfortunately, I don’t think any of the gains toward being more natural were worth the loss of those skills. I wish I had kept more written notes as a child.

Over the past year or so, there have been several review articles that I tagged to revisit. This one will join that list. Perhaps for the coming year I will pick 6-12 articles to revisit and make a bigger effort to explore some of the resources mentioned.

With sweetness,
S.