The Pros and Cons of Cognitive Functional Grammar:Reviewing Tomlin's Functional Grammar
Jingyi Sun · 2011
Born with the features of functional grammar and cognitive grammar,Tomlin's grammar focuses on the projection from conceptual representation to linguistic representation.From a very new perspective,Tomlin's grammar wants to answer this question: Why does language have the structure as the way it is? Borrowing the concepts and method from functional grammar,this grammar tries to seek the factors that motivate the language generation of all languages.The drawbacks of this grammar include:(a) only studying the generating process,(b) having the possibility of circular argument because it is difficult to exclude factors beyond language,(c) not explaining clearly the functions of different parts of the grammar,and(d) lacking suitable concepts.