Masayoshi Shibatani
Deedee McMurtry Professor of Humanities and Professor of Linguistics,
Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

This presentation points out that functional grammarians are still preoccupied with the form of expressions rather than grammatical functions. The cases in point are Haiman’s (1985) functional explanations for the distributions of causative and middle constructions and Dixon’s (2000) recent functional-typological account of causatives. In the former, formal properties such as ‘the formal distance between cause and result’ and ‘full vs. reduced forms’ play a major role, while in the latter a scale of ‘compactness’ of expressions provides a parameter for the form-function correlation found in causative expressions.

Haiman’s reference to Zipf’s (1935) work on the correlation between frequency and form misses an important aspect to it; namely the latter’s observation that ‘the degree of distinctness of meaning...seem[s] to bear an inverse relationship to F[requency] and C[rystalization] [of the configuration].’ (157)

It is argued in this presentation that form is important in so far as it makes the meaning or grammatical function transparent or explicit.