The Functional Perspective on Language and Discourse

Over the last forty years, the functionalist approach to linguistic description and explanation has given rise to several major schools of thought that share two crucial assumptions: (i) form is not independent of meaning/function or language use; and (ii) linguistic description and explanation need to take into account the communicative function of language. This volume offers readers interested in functional linguistics a selected sample of studies that jointly prove the efficacy of the analytical tools and procedures broadly accepted within the functionalist tradition in order to investigate language and discourse, with special focus on key pragmatic/discourse notions such as contextualization, grammaticalisation, reference, politeness, (in-)directness, discourse markers, speech acts, subjective evaluation and sentiment analysis in texts, among others. In addition, this volume offers specific corpus-based techniques for the objective contextualisation of linguistic data, which is crucial given the central role allotted to context in both functional linguistics and pragmatics/discourse analysis.

Anne McCabe, Saint Louis University, in Functions of Language Vol. 22:3 (2015):
The volume is highly valuable precisely in the depth and breadth of approaches provided. The more theoretical chapters by Wray and Stubbs are, in my view, brilliant, sketching out needed and promising areas of research for future scholars. [...] The very solid chapters [...] provide clarity of theoretical perspectives and depth of application and analysis, serving to effectively demonstrate the relatedness of pragmatics and functional perspectives in illuminating how language functions in use.