Lexis and Grammar in Spoken and Written Discourse

This book, entirely based on authentic and attested language, is the outcome of several years of teaching English Language and Translation to undergraduates studying English for Politics: their main concerns and purposes are acquiring a language which allows them to “talk politics”, as it were, in its broadest sense. When they begin their university experience, students expect to study grammar, meant as a set of rules and structures, separate from the lexicon. Indeed, this book starts with the assumption that lexis and grammar are inextricably linked and that it is folly to decouple them. It cannot be denied, though, that grammar has long been described separately from lexis, and only recently has the notion of lexico-grammar come into some advanced grammars. Lexis has long been entirely concerned with word meaning and not with pattern, and phraseology was hardly an issue of serious study. Yet, phraseology constitutes 80% of our language and only with the advent of corpora has this been unveiled. Over the last three or four decades research in corpus linguistics has shown that lexis and grammar are closely interdependent. In this book I advocate Brazil’s concept that grammar is responsible for assembling units and manages the organization of units into texts, like the textual glue which holds the text together. In other words, grammar is not involved in the creation of meaning, but rather it is concerned with the management of meaning, and it is through the constant relationship between lexis and grammar, or between syntax and semantics, to put it differently, or between structure and vocabulary, that meaning is created. This book is also influenced by Halliday’s view of lexis and grammar as “complementary perspectives” and his conception of the two as notional ends of a continuum, in that if you interrogate the system grammatically you will get grammar-like answers and if you interrogate it lexically you get lexis-like answers. The book is also strongly influenced by Hoey’s theory which reverses the role of lexis and grammar, arguing that lexis is complexly and systematically structured and that grammar is an outcome of this lexical structure. Following Sinclair’s ‘idiom principle’ and Hoey’s ‘lexical priming’, the book attempts to prove that the freedom to combine words in text is much more restricted than is often realized, and that although we are in principle free to say whatever we want, in practice we are constrained and influenced in many ways. Taking the above ideas as our starting point, Lexis and Grammar, hence the title of the book, takes all its data from real life language, and in particular from British and American politics, both from spoken and written data.