"The Lexical Items Must Be Somewhere"

Fontaine (2017: 8):

However, these positions are not necessarily entirely opposing. Butler (2009:59) suggests that “since a lexical item is defined by the selection expression through which it is generated, it could be claimed that there is in effect a kind of lexicon, and furthermore that the realisation statements attached to networks will specify the syntactic patterns associated with lexical items”. In this sense, there may need to be some kind of lexicon, a large, complex network of lexical entries (however they are defined). The lexical items must be somewhere and must be accounted for somehow in the model. It is perhaps worth noting that Fawcett (1994, 2014) describes modelling nouns in the computational implementation of his model of SFL. The representation is in the form of an ontological network but there is no examination of the nature of the lexical item itself, i.e. in terms of its form(s) and functions or its semantic properties. Due to limitations of space, a full discussion of this is not possible here. On the issue of lexis discussed at this point, Fawcett concludes that “Halliday’s original 1961 insight was well-founded, the only major modification needed being that lexically realised meanings are not necessarily most delicate’, in the sense of ‘at or near the terminal leaves of the system network” (1994:79).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, lexical items are accounted for, but they are not accounted for by a lexicon. Instead, lexical items are accounted for by the system networks of the lexicogrammatical stratum, whose most delicate features are synthetically realised by lexical items.

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, features in networks are explanatory, not ontological; or as Halliday (2003 [1992]: 200) puts it:

They are not "reified": that is, they are not endowed with a spurious reality of their own.