from the need to express meaning:

"The notion of autonomy emerges from an undeniable fact of all languages, 'the curious lack of accord ... between form and function'"

Croft explains that, until the 1970s, functionalism related to semantics and pragmatics, or the 'semiotic function'. But around 1980s the notion of function changed from semiotics to "external function", proposing a neo-Darwinian view of language change as based on

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