Fontaine's Achievement In This Paper

Fontaine (2017: 15):

In closing, I follow Thompson (2015:26) when he says “everything we know about language suggests that structural configurations always take on a semiotic life of their own”. This also applies to lexis. In SFL, one of the main approaches to working with variation is through context (especially context of situation or register). I have tried to reconcile these different perspectives by drawing on context to enable the representation of the semiotic life of words.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, structural configurations constitute the syntagmatic dimension of grammar. The syntagmatic dimension of lexis is collocation (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 64, 644).

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, context of situation and register are not the same thing — as Fontaine's own Fig. 2 and Fig. 3, adapted from Halliday, both illustrate. A context of situation is an instance of context (the culture as a semiotic system), whereas register is a sub-potential of language. That is, situation and register differ in terms of both stratification and instantiation. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 384):

[3] As the examination of this paper has demonstrated, Fontaine has suggested applying the cline of instantiation to lexical items, oblivious of the fact that, in SFL Theory, the cline of instantiation already applies to lexical items, as it does to all strata. In doing so, Fontaine has equated 'lexical item as potential' with 'most local context', despite the fact that SFL Theory (i) locates lexical items within a stratum of language, lexicogrammar, and (ii) identifies context with the culture — not language — as a semiotic system. The theoretical relevance of the term 'most local' to context, or lexis, has not been discussed anywhere in the paper.

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.