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

—Chapter 18. Lexical Functions— 95
There are two more candidates for the status of simple standard LFs: Germ and Nocer,
which have been played with for a long time; but today I think that it is not worth trying to
introduce them into the inventory of Standard LFs.
Germ (Lat. germen (embryo)) meaning (germ, beginning) is poorly represented:
Fr. Germ(colère (anger)) = ferment, levain (yeast) [de la ~], Germ(idea) = germ [of an ~]—and
that’s about it: I cannot think of other good examples.
Nocer (Lat. nocēre (do harm)) denotes a harmful action that the referent of L is supposed to
do to a ‘victim’: in English, a bee stings and a snake bites, as well as a dog, but in French, a dog
(bites) (mord), while a bee or a snake (picks) (pique 〈*mord〉); in Russian, a dog (bites) (kusaet),
but a bee or a snake both (bites) (kusaet) or (stings) (žalit); in English, a car runs over/down a
pedestrian, in Russian, it (crashes) (davit) him, and in French, it (mows) (fauche) him; and so
forth. But, on the one hand, it seems that the possible arguments and values are not numerous
enough; on the other hand, the necessary meaning can be probably better described by a
combination of two LFs: AntiBon and Involv. Indeed, AntiBon 1Involv(automobile) could be
strikes Y [a tree, a cement wall], smashes into Y ((bad for itself) = (does harm to itself)), while
AntiBon 2Involv(automobile) would then stand for runs Y over, strikes Y [a pedestrian], etc. I
prefer the latter description as more analytical.
For the reasons indicated, I did not put these two LFs on my list.
But, as has been said above, it is immaterial—in both practice and theory—whether we
decide to treat an LF as standard or non-standard (cf. Polguère 200?).
8 Lexical Functions in Computer Applications
LFs were invented in 1961, during my participation—as a hired worker—in a geological
expedition in Southern Kazakhstan semi-desert. Walking up and down stony hills, I was return-
ing in my head one of well-known problems of machine translation: how to avoid or at least
reduce tedious search for lexically-determined contextual Russian equivalents of such English
lexemes as IMPORTANT, EXTENSIVE, HEAVY, HIGH, on the one hand, and DO, MAKE, GIVE, GET,
etc. on the other. That is how I figured out what later became Magn and Oper 1. This goal was
clearly stated in Žolkovskij & Mel´čuk 1967; cf. also a specific proposal to this effect in Kula-
gina & Mel´čuk 1968: 301-302.
It turned out later that LFs have, at the same time, an important theoretical status. For one
thing, they constitute the ‘missing link’ in the theory of phraseology, since they are necessary to