Formalism (linguistics)
[7] Rudolph Carnap defined the meaning of the adjective formal in 1934 as follows:"A theory, a rule, a definition, or the like is to be called formal when no reference is made in it either to the meaning of the symbols (for example, the words) or to the sense of the expressions (e.g. the sentences), but simply and solely to the kinds and order of the symbols from which the expressions are constructed.
Many mathematicians disagreed and proposed "formalism" which considered mathematical sequences and operations as purely axiomatic with no mental content and thus disconnected from human psychology.
[10] Advocates of early formalism had compared mathematics to a game of chess where all valid moves are based on a handful of arbitrary rules void of any truly meaningful content.
He however develops the idea to a different direction, attempting to demonstrate that each synchronic state of a language is similar to a chess composition in that its history is irrelevant to the players.
Unlike the mathematical formalists, Saussure considers all signs as meaningful by definition, and argues that the "rules"—in his thesis, laws of the semiotic system—are universal and eternal.
In 1943, Louis Hjelmslev combined Saussure's concept of the bilateral sign (meaning + form) with Rudolph Carnap's mathematical grammars.
Again, Roman Jakobson, who was indeed a member of the Prague functionalist school, was also an advocate of a literary theory or movement called Russian formalism.
Based on his ideas, Bloomfield wrote his 1914 textbook An Introduction to the Study of Language becoming the leading figure in American linguistics until his death in 1949.
His justification for the analysis became that the syntactic structures uncovered by a generative linguist are innate and based on a random genetic mutation.
[20] In other words, a formalism (i.e. a syntactic model) is used to reveal hidden patterns or symmetries underlying human language.
[21] This type of functionalism includes various frameworks which are inspired by memetics and linked with the cognitive linguistics of George Lakoff and his associates.
Such a framework, then, is purely descriptivist and atheoretical—that is, it does not aim to explain why languages are the way they are—or only theoretical as pertains to the concept of the word 'theory' in mathematics, especially model theory.
[25] In one formulation, this notion is defined as syntax being arbitrary and self-contained with respect to meaning, semantics, pragmatics, and other factors external to language.
[27] A characteristic stance of formalist approaches is the primacy of form (like syntax), and the conception of language as a system in isolation from the outer world.
[28][29] Generative linguistics has been characterized, and parodied, as the view that a dictionary and a grammar textbook adequately describe a language.
