Autonomous Syntax Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 67-8):

As I discuss in the Postscript, however, proposals that the brain and the mind function like digital computers do not stand up to scrutiny. The idea of mental representations posited without reference to brain mechanisms and structures does not fare much better. An examination of how animals and people categorise the world, and how babies mentally develop, undercuts the idea that language can be adequately explained by syntactical analyses carried out in the absence of an adequate explanation of meaning.  The objectivist view of the world is at best incomplete and at worst downright wrong. The brain is not a computer and the world is not a piece of computer tape.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, syntax is the form that meaning takes, so the Chomskyan Formal Linguistics notion of autonomous syntax is nonsensical.  Meaning is the function that syntax performs.