Chapter 18 Lexical Functions: Description of Lexical Relations in a ...

—Chapter 18. Lexical Functions— 77
NB: What has just been said should by no means be construed as a claim to the effect that it is always or even
fairly often possible to state the semantic conditions for the distribution of LF shared values. Quite on the
contrary, I think that, as a general rule, such description is unfeasible—because of a very high degree of
idiosyncrasy in lexical cooccurrence. However, some regularities or tendencies exist beyond any doubt, and
it is worth the researcher’s effort to capture them.
5.3. Ellipsis of the keyword of an LF
In texts, sentences are often seen in which the keyword of an LF has been elided, while the
LF’s expression, i.e., an element of its value, is present. For instance, sentence (12) is quite clear:
(12) 1.10$ a liter and climbing [ a newspaper title].
It is about the donate blood, gasoline price; but how is the verb CLIMB selected if the noun PRICE
is not in the sentence? To produce (12), its DSyntS must contain the LU PRICE, which will
determine the correct choice of the element for the LF IncepPredPlus:
IncepPredPlus
I
PRICE
!
CLIMB
subjectival
PRICE
Only when the proper element of the value of the LF is in the SSyntS can the ellipsis take place.
As one sees, such ellipses do not create any additional difficultes for the use of LFs.
6 Linguistic Nature of Lexical Functions
To characterize the linguistic nature of Lexical Functions in a more profound way, I will
discuss now the semantic aspect of LFs, their phraseological aspect, their place in utterance
representations, and their universality.
6.1 Semantic Aspect of Lexical Functions
Under this heading, five points have to be made:
• an LF is by no means a semantic unit;
• an LF can have several semantic subtypes;
• an LF can return semantically different sets of elements of its value contingent on different
semantic ‘facets’ of the keyword;
• some syntagmatic LFs have to be related to some components in the definitions of their
keyword;
• LFs are Deep Lexical Units.