Formalism and functionalism in linguistics: The engineer and the collector.

Thomas contends that 'Bloomfieldian formalism...had a major impact on linguistics in the first half of the twentieth-century America' (22), and Chomsky's formalism dominated the second half. In her content-filled 118 pages of Formalism and Functionalism in Linguistics, Margaret Thomas provides a lucid, comprehensive and balanced history of a complex subject in contemporary linguistics. In the first chapter, 'Defining "formalism" and "functionalism"', Thomas prepares the reader for the difficulty of working with these terms that do not have either-or boundaries; instead, she compares it to political discourse, in which terms such as "liberal" or "conservative" are subject to varying viewpoints. In Chapter 2, "Background to the current debate", Thomas offers a brief history of the concepts of formalism and functionalism, claiming that 'Remarkably, there has been little reflection on whether the comparison between formalism and functionalism has much of a past' (15). [Extracted from the article]