Fontaine (2017: 2):
The two dimensions mentioned above, delicacy and instantiation, provide complementary rather than contradictory approaches. Work on lexis within SFL is scarce as will be discussed below and as with most challenging areas, there is merit in tackling a problem from more than one angle. The realm of word study is the domain of lexicology and so it seems sensible to ask whether there is any common ground to be found between this more bottom up approach to the lexico-grammar and SFL’s more top down approach. The point of departure and the nature of the concerns are very different. Lexicologists tend to start with the word as the unit of study and work outwards, where outwards can mean into the mind or lexicon (typically psycholinguistics and to some extent cognitive linguistics) or into (co-)text and beyond (typically corpus linguistics).
Lexicology covers all areas of interest related to what we think of as the word from lexical semantics to etymology and morphology, including the general area of phraseology. When it comes to phraseology, connections to context offer a potential area of common interest to the two perspectives on the lexico-grammar. What they share to some extent is an interest in lexico-grammar and in data that focusses on “the occurrence of patterns which lie somewhere between abstract structures and individual lexical items or combinations of these” (Butler, 2013:206). The interface of context and lexicology spans the range of lexical studies from the more cognitive perspective to the more social perspective.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, since delicacy and instantiation are ordering principles of dimensions of SFL Theory, they cannot be contradictory approaches — just as the ordering principles realisation and metafunction are not contradictory approaches.
[2] To be clear, such approaches are fundamentally inconsistent with the approach of SFL Theory. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 2, 603):
But at the same time our own approach, both in theory and in method, is in contradistinction to that of cognitive science: we treat "information" as meaning rather than as knowledge and interpret language as a semiotic system, and more specifically as a social semiotic, rather than as a system of the human mind. …
Others have also been critical of the established academic view of mind; and some recent book titles suggest the kinds of alternatives that have been offered: "embodied mind", "social mind", "discursive mind". These suggest that the concept of 'mind' should be brought into close relation with other phenomena — biological, social, or semiotic. … But once this has been done, the mind itself tends to disappear, it is no longer necessary as a construct sui generis. Instead of experience being construed by the mind, in the form of knowledge, we can say that experience is construed by the grammar; to 'know' something is to have transformed some portion of experience into meaning. To adopt this perspective is to theorise "cognitive processes" in terms of semiotic, social and biological systems; and thus to see them as a natural concomitant of the processes of evolution.
This does not mean that these other approaches are invalid, but that the uncritical importation of such theorising into SFL Theory creates theoretical inconsistencies of a fundamental kind.
[3] To be clear, from the perspective of SFL Theory, paradigmatically, phraseology is concerned with an intermediate degree of delicacy: the theoretical space between grammatical systems and lexical sets; syntagmatically, this is the theoretical space between grammatical structure and lexical collocation. (The Butler quote merely presents his less precise understanding of the syntagmatic aspect of Halliday's insight.)
[4] To be clear, for the most part, the use of the word 'context' in this paper, bears little resemblance to it's theoretical meaning in SFL: the culture as semiotic system-&-process. In terms of SFL Theory, the way that SFL and lexicology could be said to "connect to context" is that they share the field category 'linguistics'. However, this is not Fontaine's understanding, as demonstrated by her wordings "connections to context" and "the interface of context and lexicology".