A defense of functionalism in linguistics, and more specifically the competition model of linguistic performance, examines six misconceptions about the functionalist approach. Functionalism is defined as the belief that the forms of natural languages are created, governed, constrained, acquired, and used for communicative functions. Functionalism is viewed as the natural alternative to language theories that postulate the separation of structure and function or describe structural facts without reference to communicative goals or the capabilities of human information processing. These six misconceptions are addressed, then replaced with more viable functionalist accounts: (1) grammars reflect the interaction between cognitive content and cognitive processes; (2) symbolic and indexical relations exist between form and function; (3) mappings between form and function are many-to-many; (4) grammatical mappings are inherently probabilistic; (5) functionalism is biologically plausible; and (6) functionalist claims are made at different levels. (MSE)