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

—Chapter 18. Lexical Functions— 94
The inventory of LFs is established empirically, and no logical reasoning can guarantee the non-
existence of other LFs.
First, a language that has not yet been explored for restricted lexical coccurrence could
have an LF which is not known today, something, say, like (of a big size) or (deal with Y in a
friendly/unfriendly manner). True, the probability of finding such a function cannot be very high,
because the most abstract and general meanings appearing as LFs are already, so to speak,
involved and an LF by definition tends to be associated with a very abstract and general meaning.
Second, the borderline between standard and non-standard LFs is strictly quantitative,
which means that it is rather fuzzy: the researcher has to decide whether a given LF should be
treated as a standard or non-standard one, and in many cases the decision is far from obvious.
Thus, consider three candidates for Simple Standard LFs: (female of) = Fem, (male of) = Masc, and
(young of) = Juven. All the three are defined for all animal names:
Fem(horse) = mare Masc(horse) = stallion Juven(horse) = foal
Fem(chicken) = hen Masc(chicken) = rooster Juven(chicken) = chick
Fem(cat) = (pussy)cat Masc(cat) = (tom)cat Juven(cat) = kitten
Fem(goose) = goose Masc(goose) = gander Juven(goose) = gosling
Fem(elephant) = elephant cow, Masc(elephant) = elephant bull, Juven(elephant) = baby
cow elephant bull elephant elephant
Fem(tiger) = tigress Masc(tiger) = tiger Juven(tiger) = tiger
cub
Do they qualify? I think that in English rather not: their keywords are limited in number
and very specific: just animal names. In addition, they do not participate in paraphrasing. (But I
by no means insist on this opinion.) However, nothing precludes us from discovering a language
where these LFs will embrace also human beings, including names of inhabitants; in such a
language it would be more justified to consider Fem, Masc and Juven as standard LFs.
For the same reason, I do not think that it is worth introducing as a Standard LF the LF
Pecun = (currency of): USA ~ dollar, Germany ~ mark, Ukraine ~ karbovanec, Norway ~ crown,
Greece ~ drachma, Japan ~ yen, Israel ~ shekel, Paraguay ~ guaraní, Samoa ~ tala, ...: the set of
possible keywords is closed and they are highly specific (names of countries). In addition, the LF
Pecun is too sensitive to ‘external’ change: thus, the advent of the euro wiped out many of its
possible values. And, most importantly, Pecun again cannot participate in paraphrasing.