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Lexis and lexicology
INTRODUCTION
The study of lexis is the study of the vocabulary of languages in all its aspects: words and
their meanings, how words relate to one another, how they may combine with one
another, and the relationships between vocabulary and other areas of the description of
languages, the phonology, morphology, and syntax.
LEXICAL SEMANTICS
Central to the study of lexis is the question of word meaning. If the word is an
identifiable unit of a language then it must be possible to isolate a core, stable meaning
that enables its consistent use by a vast number of users in many contexts over long
periods of time. Linguists have attempted to see the meaning of a word in terms of the
features that compose it—its componential features—and the process of analysis of
those features as lexical composition. Most important in this respect is the work of Katz
and Fodor (1963). According to them, words are decomposable into primitive meanings
and these primitives can be represented by markers. In addition, distinguishers,
specific characteristics of the referents of words, serve to differentiate between different
word senses. The description of a word in a dictionary must cover the wide range of
senses that words can have: the dictionary entry is a ‘characterization of every sense that
a lexical item can bear in any sentence’ (ibid.). See SEMANTICS, pages 397–8, for a
diagram and exposition of Katz and Fodor’s descriptive apparatus as this is employed to
deal with the term bachelor.
Another way of looking at the features of a word’s meaning is componential analysis
(CA). CA breaks the word down into a list of the components present in its meaning; thus
man can be ascribed the features + HUMAN + ADULT + MALE (Leech, 1981, p. 90).
Once again, the purpose of CA is to distinguish the meaning of a given word from that of
any other word, but the features attached to a word will also identify it as belonging to a
field or domain (Nida, 1975, p. 339) which it shares with other words having common
components. Father, mother, son, sister, aunt, etc., are united in having the components
of HUMAN and KINSHIP in common (ibid.). CA enables us to identify synonyms, i.e.
words that have identical componential features, regardless of differences of register, and
to identify anomalous combinations such as ‘male woman’ (Leech, 1967, p. 21)
(compare, again, SEMANTICS, pp. 395–8 for more on componential analysis).
But CA and the kind of labelling proposed by Katz and Fodor are open to criticism.
Most powerful among early criticisms to appear was that of Bolinger (1965b). who
showed that the two categories of marker and distinguisher could easily be collapsed,
rendering the distinction questionable: the distinction anyway did not correspond to any