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The linguistics encyclopedia 408
(Cowie, 1981). Bolinger (1976) and Sinclair (1987b) are also central to any study of
multiword units, both of them arguing for the need to see idiomaticity and analyticity—
the amenability of linguistic phenomena to be broken down into ever smaller analytic
units—as equally important to language study. This idiomatic view of the lexicon shifts
the emphasis irrevocably from seeing the word as the unit of the lexicon to the adoption
of more eclectic units.
LEXIS IN A TRANSFORMATIONAL
FRAMEWORK
In the simplest version of a transformational grammar, three components are present
(Radfqrd, 1981, p. 118): categorical rules, a lexicon or dictionary, and a lexicalinsertion
rule, which attaches actual lexical items to lexical category nodes, a later stage
in the operation of sentence production, once the syntax has been worked out. The
lexicon and categorical component are the base of the grammar (Chomsky, 1977).
However, to guarantee that deviant sentences will not be produced, a lexical entry—what
appears in the dictionary—has to specify additional information such as transitivity
restrictions, complementation patterns, etc., as well as the basic morphological, semantic,
and phonological information which enable it to be used appropriately in the surface
structure of a sentence.
Semantic information about a word generates selection restrictions, for instance, that
certain verbs may only combine with animate objects (see Chomsky, 1965, pp. 106–11),
as well as contributing to the word’s formal structure (Bresnan, 1978), a more abstract
representation of logical relationships. In Chomsky’s (1965, p. 85) account of a
transformational grammar, the item boy gets an entry reminiscent, but with syntactic
additions, of the componential-feature analysis of lexical semantics: boy [+ N + Count +
Common + Animate + Human]. The nature and type of information attached to a lexical
entry, and the dividing lines between lexical ‘idiosyncrasies’ and the transformational
component of the grammar have been the subject of much debate (Chomsky, 1970a;
Jackendoff, 1975). For a general survey see Newmeyer (1980, pp. 112–20), who traces
the debate within the genesis of generative semantics).
Although Chomsky’s primary definition of the lexicon as an ‘unordered list of all
lexical formatives’ (1965, p. 84) may seem to relegate lexis to an unstructured domain
within language, the same work acknowledges the systematic semantic structuring of
lexis along the lines of field theory (see above, pp. 299–300); indeed words are held to
have field properties that unite them (1965, p. 160). Overall, the status of the lexicon
within transformational-generative linguistics has shifted and grown over the years (e.g.
Bresnan, 1978) and seems likely to continue to occupy its more central position within
this and other branches of language study (compare LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL
GRAMMAR).