Introduction to Lexis and Grammar in Spoken and Written Discourse

In this book I advocate Brazil’s (1995) 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 (Scott and Tribble 2006). 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 (1991) 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” (Halliday 1992). The book is also strongly influenced by Hoey’s (2005) 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 (1987) ‘idiom principle’ and Hoey’s (2004) ‘lexical priming’, the book attempts to prove that the freedom to combine words in text is much more restricted than is often realized (Stubbs 2001), and that although we are in principle free to say whatever we want, in practice we are constrained and influenced in many ways.