Traditional grammar books comprise chapters based on grammatical categories, such as “Nouns,” “Verbs,” and “Subordinate clauses.” Such an approach follows the principle “from form to meaning.” During the last 25 years, I have been working on an alternative model of description, which I call Functional syntax. It is based on the reverse principle, “from meaning to form,” which reflects the position of the speaker. Such a linguistic description answers the question “Which structures are used for expressing action, emotional state, request, negation, quantity etc. in language x?” For example, physiological state can be expressed in Russian, English and many other languages by using a set of different constructions. cf. I am cold, John has (got) a cold, John is in a coma; Мне холодно, Меня лихорадит, У меня грипп, Я болен, Ирина простудилась. In a traditional grammar these structures are described in terms of various parts of syntax, while in functional syntax they are discussed under one heading, “Physiological state.”

The first scholar who expressed the need to approach linguistic structure from the reverse perspective seems to have been Georg von Gabelentz in 1892. After him many other scholars have addressed the same issue, one of whom was the famous Danish linguist Otto Jespersen. The Russian scholar Lev Scherba, known for being an original thinker, used the notion of a speaker’s grammar in this connection, because it is the speaker who starts with the meaning. There have also been some practically oriented attempts to use this idea (e.g. Dik, Halliday and van Valin in the West and Bondarko, Miloslavski, Zolotova and Vsevolodova in Russia). My own model strives to be more comprehensive and systematic than previous ones.

The first version of the theory was published in Finnish in 1993. Its basic ideas are reflected in an article in Voprosy jazykoznanija

A book expounding the theory was published in Moscow in 2006 (and a second edition without changes in 2010). The painting by Wassily Kandinsky on the cover «Мечтательная импровизация» [A dreaming improvisation] symbolises the idea of the book.

An English summary of the book appeared in the Russian Language Journal in 2007.

The book Contrastive Functional Analysis by Andrew Chesterman (1998) is based on the idea of functional syntax.

Now our research team (Zinaida Sabitova, Leonid Birjulin, Tatjana Parmenova and I) is finalising the book Функциональный синтаксис русского языка (Functional syntax of Russian). We hope that it will be published by the end of 2016. An abridged English version is also under work.

At our department, two doctoral theses have been written on the basis of functional syntax theory:

Johanna Viimaranta. Talking about time in Russian and Finnish. Slavica Helsingiensia 29. 2006.

Arja Kirvesmäki. Выражение обобщенно-личного значения в русском языке. Slavica Helsingiensia 38. 2010.