APA Dictionary of Psychology

a distinction between two fundamentally different ways of analyzing language, one with respect to its structural properties (form) and the other with respect to its communicative properties (function). For example, a formal analysis of the utterance Where are the pencils? would point to the use of where and the auxiliary verb be to frame a wh- question and the agreement between that verb and the subject pencils; a functional analysis would need to judge whether the utterance is a request for information or a request for action. See formal grammar; functional grammar.