In this article Halliday, questions the approach of language acquisition (syntax)with construction/semantics. He highlights that language is learnt through meaningful interaction with other people and making sense of the world in which we live is achieved through language. They key goal of interaction/making meaning is functional and communicative.
M. Hearst. Proceedings of the 14th conference on Computational linguistics, 2, page 539--545. Stroudsburg, PA, USA, Association for Computational Linguistics, (1992)