Ideation: Establishing Lexical Texture

The traditional approaches to the study of lexis usually take the form of a dictionary or a thesaurus. Lexical studies in the systemic circle trace back to Firth’s (1957) interest in the collocation phenomenon, i.e. how words that form a syntagmatic structure are mutually expectant. For example, one of the collocates for the word dark is most likely to be night, and vice versa. These two words are in a mutually expectant relationship. Firth proposed to approach lexical meanings from two complementary perspectives: context and collocation. The contextual meaning of a sentence, as was discussed in Chap. 2 , refers to the functional relationship of a sentence to its context of situation in the context of culture. One of the collocational meanings for the word night, for example, is its collocability with dark. Collocation is in this sense the study of lexical meaning from a syntagmatic perspective on the lexicogrammatical stratum. Halliday is among the principal linguists to develop Firth’s theory, and lexis was fitted nicely into his first scale model, as “most delicate grammar” (Halliday, 1961), which he refers to as the “grammarian’s dream”. For him, the final aim for a grammarian would be to develop a grammar to the point of dissolving lexis. Two approaches are developed separately within the systemic circle to realize the grammarian’s dream, including the componential and the taxonomic approach (see Martin, 1992: 277–285 for a review of these two approaches).