Mistaking Grammatical Words For Lexical Items

Fontaine (2017: 7):

It is also worth mentioning work done on lexis within an SFL framework on verb sense classification. For example, Matthiessen (2014) and Thompson (2015) have both offered advances on lexical issues within transitivity. Discussions of transitivity configurations in SFL come very close to describing lexical representation for a given verb is typically the case in other approaches to transitivity. Finally, while there is no space here to discuss lexical modelling in computational approaches within SFL, it is worth noting very briefly work done by Fawcett, Tucker, and Lin, 1993; Fawcett, 1994; Matthiessen and Bateman, 1991; and O'Donnell, Cheng and Hitzeman, 1998 to name only a few. One important insight coming out of this work suggests there is a need for lexical representation of one kind or another, at least for computational applications.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here Fontaine confuses word as lexical item with word as grammatical rank unit. The verb is a class of grammatical unit, and discussions of verbs in relation to experiential grammar (transitivity) are discussions of the verb as a constituent of the verbal group realising the clause function: Process. Lexical items, on the other hand, are the synthetic realisation of a bundle of the most delicate lexicogrammatical features — analogous to the phoneme /b/ being the synthetic realisation of the feature bundle [voiced, bilabial, stop].

[2] To be clear, the need for lexical representation is not an "important insight" coming out of this work, because the notion of lexical representation, which assumes a mental lexicon, is inconsistent with both SFL Theory and the known facts of human biology and brain science, as previously noted.