The way to analyse ‘way’: A case study in word-specific local grammar
Abstract
Traditionally, dictionaries are meaning-driven—that is, they list different senses (or supposed senses) of each word, but do not say much about the phraseology that distinguishes one sense from another. Grammars, on the other hand, are structure-driven: they attempt to describe all possible structures of a language, but say little about meaning, phraseology, or collocation. In both disciplines during the 20th century, the practice of inventing evidence rather than discovering it led to intermittent and unpredictable distortions of fact. Since 1987, attempts have been made in both lexicography (Cobuild) and syntactic theory (pattern grammar, construction grammar) to integrate meaning and phraseology. Corpora now provide empirical evidence on a large scale for lexicosyntactic description, but there is still a long way to go. Many cherished beliefs must be abandoned before a synthesis between empirical lexical analysis and grammatical theory can be achieved. In this paper, by empirical analysis of just one word (the noun way), we show how corpus evidence can be used to tackle the complexities of lexical and constructional meaning, providing new insights into the lexis-grammar interface.Citation
Hanks, P., & Može, S. (2019). The way to analyse ‘way’: A case study in word-specific local grammar. International Journal of Lexicography, 32 (3), pp 247-269.Publisher
Oxford AcademicJournal
International Journal of LexicographyType
Journal articleLanguage
enDescription
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Oxford Academic in International Journal of Lexicography on 11/02/2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecz005 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.ISSN
0950-3846ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1093/ijl/ecz005
Scopus Count
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