ИСТИНА

I claim that despite the labels ‘formal’ vs ‘functional’ are important for the self-identification of modern linguists, the distinction of formal vs functional approaches is often obscured and dwarfed by two other distinctions ― the distinction of linguistic vs philological analysis and the distinction of usus-based vs normative-based models.At the one hand, grammar (and sound system!) is always restrictive and constraint-based. At the other hand, intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic variation of parameter values is a normal state of all natural languages and their grammars. In other words, grammatical descriptions must be verified or falsified statistically. Parameters differ from elementary linguistic features and have a hierarchical structure: they are based on hypothesis how classes of the world’s languages can be grouped.The critic assessment of the concepts implemented in the parametric typology is a prerequisite of any successful application. Meanwhile, the set of such concepts cannot be reduced to the so called comparative concepts directly based on the comparison of language-specific data.