Tuesday 18 August 2015

David Rose On Lexical Items

'enable' and ‘understand’ are lexical items realised as verbs… 
It is very common to confuse lexical items with grammatical process types, which is why I am posting this reply to the list 




Blogger Comments:

[1] In SFL, lexical items are not realised by verbs — a lexical item is not more symbolically abstract than a verb.

A lexical item realises a composite of lexical features, whereas verb is a grammatical class at the rank of word.  The two are therefore related in terms of delicacy, and the lexical item is less symbolically abstract.

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 568):
The folk notion of the “word” is really a conflation of two different abstractions, one lexical [lexical item] and one grammatical [word rank].

[2] The common error is to assign verbs to process types, not 'to confuse lexical items with grammatical process types'.