Formalist linguists, particularly within the Chomskyan generative tradition, critique functional frameworks like SFL for lacking mathematical elegance in syntactic derivation. They argue that by focusing on social context and metafunctions, functionalism underemphasizes the universal, innate cognitive structures of the human brain. From this viewpoint, lexicogrammatical cartography is seen as overly descriptive and taxonomical, failing to provide a parsimonious account of the universal grammar that underlies all human languages regardless of social function.