Fontaine's Argument Against Lexis As Most Delicate Grammar

Fontaine (2017: 9-10):

As mentioned above, Martin points out the backgrounding of lexis in SFL, suggesting that this is related to an account of lexis as most delicate grammar. This view of lexis brings with it some degree of risk since it could result in treating lexis as taxonomically organised and this could lead to prioritising homophonous lexical relations rather than semantic ones. The reason for this is that if we take as a starting point Halliday's (1972/2013:8) view that “the output of any path through the network of systems is a structure”, the ‘most’ delicate system will lead directly to a lexical item (cf criticisms by Hunston and Francis, 2000 and Groom, 2005). This is a view of lexical representation which would be very difficult to accept for most lexicologists as it would predict that a lexeme with polysemes would need to be available at the terminal point of a variety of systems.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misunderstands Martin's claim. To be clear, Martin claims that what has been backgrounded is Halliday's distinction between grammatical words and lexical items and a syntagmatic perspective on lexical items. Martin (2016:45):

Firth's interest in collocation (‘the company words keep’) has been developed in corpus linguistic research – chiefly by Sinclair and his colleagues (e.g. 1966; 1991) but less so in SFL where Halliday's early acknowledgement of the distinction between words and lexical items and the need for a syntagmatic perspective on expectancy relations among lexical items has tended to be backgrounded in relation to an interest in lexis as delicate grammar (the ‘grammarian's dream’, pursued by Hasan, and others).

See here for the misunderstandings in Martin's claim.

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, paradigmatically, relations between lexical items can be represented as hyponymic and meronymic taxonomies. It is just such relations that are exploited in lexical cohesion.

[3] This is misleading, because it is untrue. To classify lexical items in terms of how they are realised in phonology ("homophonous') is to take the view 'from below', which is the direct opposite of SFL Theory, which takes the view 'from above' (the meaning being realised in wording).

[4] This is a non-sequitur. The specification of grammatical structures and lexical items by lexicogrammatical systems does not entail classifying lexical items according to how they are realised in phonology.

[5] See here for the misunderstandings of Hunston and Francis (2000). (Fontaine does not outline the criticisms of Groom (2005).)

[6] To be clear, as [3] demonstrates, this is a view that is not consistent with SFL Theory, and as [4] demonstrates, this is a view that is not validated by Fontaine's argument. Moreover, the acceptability judgements of lexicologists are irrelevant to SFL Theory, unless they uncover inconsistency in the architecture of SFL Theory, or inabilities of the theory to account for data.

[7] This is misleading, because it is untrue. On the one hand, Fontaine again takes the view 'from below', identifying lexemes as expressions of many meanings ("polysemes"), instead of the SFL view 'from above', where a lexeme is identified as the meaning that is expressed. On the other hand, the conclusion does not follow from the argument presented, as [3] and [4] demonstrate.