Fontaine (2017: 11):
SFL is not alone in having to address these issues. In other areas of linguistics, such as in typological studies, “[t]he structure of the lexicon and its consequences for the language system have received much less attention” (Hengeveld, Rijkhoff and Siewierska, 2004:527). However, considering the structure of the lexicon forces the theory to engage with the associated assumptions. For example, in considering certain noun and verb pairs resulting from conversion, such as talk, walk, etc., Luuk (2010:352) explains that “[i]n English … tense-aspect-mood marking encodes predicate and determiners encode argument”. The fluidity between nouns and verbs in these cases raises interesting questions about word classes as I have argued elsewhere Fontaine (2017a).
Blogger Comments:
[1] As previously explained, the assumption of a mental lexicon is inconsistent with the assumptions of SFL Theory. Considering the assumptions of SFL theory forces a reconsideration of the assumption of the structure of a mental lexicon.
[2] To be clear, here again Fontaine confuses the notion of word as lexical item with word as a grammatical rank scale unit ('noun', 'verb', 'word class').
[3] To be clear, by including these observations from another theory, Fontaine confuses lexical items, which are the synthetic realisation of the most delicate lexicogrammatical features, with grammatical words that are the direct realisation of (less delicate) grammatical features.
[2] To be clear, here again Fontaine confuses the notion of word as lexical item with word as a grammatical rank scale unit ('noun', 'verb', 'word class').
[3] To be clear, by including these observations from another theory, Fontaine confuses lexical items, which are the synthetic realisation of the most delicate lexicogrammatical features, with grammatical words that are the direct realisation of (less delicate) grammatical features.