Any monad is an applicative functor, and any applicative functor provides 'pure', which does the same as return (lifting a value). The argument of the name 'return' in a discussion on syntax doesn't quite seem appropriate to me - it's an API/library problem, not one of syntax in the language. However, maybe I'm in the camp who doesn't believe too strongly in the importance of syntax though, as was mentioned in the opening paragraph...