Talk:William Diver

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"Diver stood almost alone in rejecting traditional entities that had no specific function, such as the syllable and the mechanistic interpretation of “government” or “agreement.” He analyzed language as a form of human behavior, rather than as an idealized expression of truth."

Government and agreement are not entities that have "no specific function." The former is theoretical construct used to explain a variety of observations about the configuration of words in a sentence, and the latter is both an observed property of language and a generalized theoretical construct used to explain that property. Theoretical constructs all have specific functions--to explain observations. One could argue that the notions of government and agreement don't sufficiently explain the relevant facts, but if one proposes some other explanations, those explanations have no more or less "functionality" than the ones that were being argued against.

"Rather than as an idealized expression of truth" presumably implies that generative grammar has such an analysis of language, given that concepts from generative grammar were mentioned in the previous sentence. No form of generative grammar I've ever heard of has made such a claim.