Semantics

44 BASIC SEMANTICS
Aristotle, on the other hand, proposed that we acquire knowledge by
means of the information that we obtain through our five senses. English
empiricism emphasized the importance of collecting and elaborating data
about the world to build up knowledge.
On the one hand, formal approaches to the study of language emphasize
the idea that language is basically a human faculty or capacity, which indeed
it is, usually avoiding the question of what this capacity is for.
Functional approaches, on the other hand, emphasize the importance
of the function of language, focusing on the idea that the organization of
the linguistic system is based on its main aims, that is, communication
and interaction. The different branches of functionalist theories share the
idea that language is an instrument of social interaction among human
beings (Dik 1989: 3) used with the intention of establishing communicative
relationships. They also share the idea that the question of how a language
is organized cannot be profitably studied in abstraction from the question
of why it is organized the way it is, given the communicative functions which
it fulfils (Dik 1989: 6). This definition reveals the instrumentality of language
with respect to what people do and achieve in social interaction and it is
also described (ibidem) as a structured, cooperative activity.
Cognitivism (Langacker 1987: 13), claiming to be within the empiricist
tradition, holds that there is no separation of linguistic knowledge from
general knowledge and
that even if the blueprints for language are wired genetically into the human
organism, their elaboration into a fully specified linguistic system during
language acquisition, and their implementation in everyday language use,
are clearly dependent on experiential factors and inextricably bound up with
psychological phenomena that are not specifically linguistic in character
In connection with the idea of the instrumentality of language
Cognitivism also claims that the lexicon, morphology, and syntax form a
continuum of symbolic units serving to structure conceptual content for
expressive purposes (Langacker 1987: 35).
However, things in linguistics are not that clear cut and both rationalism
and empiricism have contributed to the advance of science in general and
linguistics in particular in many important ways. Cognitivism in particular
has kept some Cartesian and Kantian contributions to the characteristics
of mental elaborations and has emphasized the importance of symbolization
processes in linguistic organization.
There are some ideas that can help to identify the differences between
a formal, rationalist tradition to linguistic analysis and a functional,
empirically based linguistic tradition.