This volume offers a variety of viewpoints on the functional approach to the study of language. After an exposition of the Prague School functionalism, and Dik's and Halliday's functional approaches, it presents a wider area of issues from a functional point of view.

1. By way of introduction (by Dirven, Rene); 2. I. 'Functional liguistics of Prague' and other functional approaches; 3. On Prague school functionalism in linguistics (by Danes, Frantisek); 4. M.A.K. Halliday's functional grammar and the Prague school (by Davidse, Kristin); 5. Some principles of functional grammar (by Dik, Simon C.); 6. S.C. Dik's functional grammar: A pilgrimage to Prague? (by Gebruers, Rudi); 7. II. The theme-rheme (tpoic-comment) issue in the Praguian tradition; 8. On the delimitation of the theme in functional sentence perspective (by Firbas, Jan); 9. Constitutive, informative and transformative models in modern English texts and sentences (by Nosek, Jiri); 10. Prague functionalism an topic vs. focus (by Sgall, Petr); 11. Functional sentence perspective and intensional logic (by Svoboda, Ales); 12. A functionalist approach to the acquisition of grammar (by Bates, Elizabeth); 13. Functional sentence perspective in discourse and language acquisition (by Paprotte, Wolf); 14. Processing strategies: A psycholinguistic neofunctionalism? (by Prideaux, Gary D.); 15. IV. Functionalism in general linguistics; 16. The overestimation of functionalism (by Labov, William); 17. Function and structure in linguistic descriptions (by Haas, W.); 18. Communication and expressivity (by Hubler, Axel); 19. Functions of intonation (by Esser, Jurgen); 20. Written language seen from the functionalist angle (by Vachek, Josef); 21. V. Functionalism in linguistic description; 22. Word-formation and poetic language: Non-lexicalized nominal compounds in the poetry of Kevin Crossley-Holland (by Boase-Beier, Jean); 23. On acceptable violations of parallelism constraints (by Grosu, Alexander); 24. A case of syntactic mimicry (by McCawley, James D.); 25. Functionalism in contrastive analysis and translation studies (by Ivir, Vladimir); 26. Index