"The Meaning Potential Of A Lexeme"

Fontaine (2017: 12):

In terms of lexical meaning, Hanks (2013:65) states his position as follows: “strictly speaking, words in isolation have meaning potential rather than meaning, and that actual meanings are best seen as events, only coming into existence when people use words, putting them together in clauses and sentences”. This position needs to be re-expressed in more SFL terms. The reference to ‘words in isolation’ can be equated to Hanks’ use of lemma, a term used in corpus linguistics to capture an abstract or uninflected form of a lexical item. This is equivalent to the term lexeme, which is typically used in psycholinguistic research. The terminology here is not very important but since lexeme has been used throughout this paper, we will continue to use it. What is significant is Hanks’ view of the meaning potential of a lexeme. In this sense the semantics are represented as potential, as non-instantiated lexeme. The lexeme then has the full meaning potential, some of which (not necessarily all) is then activated when instantiated in text.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Hanks' "position" includes the SFL distinction between potential and instance, and this, at least, does not need "to be re-expressed in more SFL terms"; but see [3]. This confirms that Fontaine is unaware that SFL Theory already models lexis in terms of potential and instance.

[2] To be clear, although Formal approaches to lexicography are inconsistent with SFL Theory, 'lemma' approximates the SFL notion of lexical item. However, this is not equivalent to 'lexeme', which is closer to the SFL notion of a word as grammatical unit, since it is an abstraction that includes all the grammatical forms:

In morphology and lexicography, a lemma is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of words (headword). In English, for example, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, with run as the lemma by which they are indexed. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the forms that have the same meaning, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme.

[3] To be clear, here Fontaine repeats Fawcett's confusion — evidence here — of 'meaning potential' (language as system) with meaning as a stratum of language (semantics: from potential to instance). The relation between lexical item as potential and lexical item as instance is the dimension of instantiation. The relation between a lexical item (as potential or instance) and the meaning (as potential or instance) that it realises, is the stratal relation between lexicogrammar and semantics.