Introduction to

THE LEXICO-GRAMMAR
Ahmad Nadhif
• While Chapters Two, Three and Four have
looked at how people use language in
texts and how those texts make meanings
in cultural and situational contexts, this
chapter begins our exploration of the
lexico-grammatical level of language by
asking: what is the function of grammar?
That is, why does language have this
intermediate level of grammatical coding?
• The chapter then examines some basic
principles of SFL grammatical analysis,
and presents the multifunctional
perspective on the clause that will be
developed in subsequent chapters.
 The traffic lights revisited:
extending the system
• In Chapter One, traffic lights were described as a
two-level semiotic system, involving a level of
content realized through a level of expression.
Language, on the other hand, was seen to involve
three levels: two levels of content (semantics and
lexico-grammar), encoded in phonology.
• The difference between the simple and the
complex semiotic systems, then was the
presence of this level of wording: the lexico-
grammar.
• The lexico-grammatical level was
described simply as an intermediate level
of linguistic coding.
• We must now consider in more detail what
the function of this level is. What, for
example, does it allow us to do in
language that we cannot do with a two-
level semiotic system like the traffic lights?
• The red/amber/green system that was
described in Chapter One has two limitations:
• 1. it does not allow us to mean very much: in
fact, we can only make three meanings.
• 2. it only allows us to mean mw thing at a
time: there is a one-to-one (bi-unique)
relationship between content and expression,
as each expression (coloured light) stands for
one and only one content (desired behaviour),
so each content is realized by one and only
one expression
• Two strategies could be used to develop the
system so that it could make more meanings.
• Firstly, new contents could be added to the
system - we could simply increase the
number of meanings the system can make.
• Alternatively, contents could be fused - we
could try to use the system to make more
than one meaning at a time. Each strategy
rapidly becomes problematic.
Adding new contents
 Simultaneous meanings
• An alternative strategy is to extend the system so that
it is able to mean more than one thing at a time.
Thus, an expression is to realize more than one
content. This can be done through the use of complex
signs, or sign sequences. For example, if we want to
mean both 'stop‘ and 'danger ahead', we could:
The demands we make of language

• However, with the semiotic system of

language, we want to make many many
more meanings than that. In fact, the
amazing demand we make of language is
that we want to use it to mean anything at
all — to make an infinite number of
meanings.
• Language meets this demand, in that it has an
unlimited creative potential. That is:
• Firstly, language allows us to mean new
things: you can say things that no one has
ever said before, and you have no trouble
understanding things that you have never
heard before.
• Secondly, language allows us to mean
anything: it is very rare that, as a speaker of a
language, you would come to a point where all
of a sudden you cannot make the meanings
you want co because the system is too limited.
• Since we are able to make infinite
meanings in language, language is very
different from the traffic lights. The
explanation for this difference lies in the
fact that language is not a bi-unique
semiotic system. There is not a one-to-one
correspondence between the content
levels of language and the expression
level.
 Lexico-grammar: the difference
• How is it, then, that language is different? How has
language got away from this restriction of bi-uniqueness?
• One part of what these sentences mean is the
words that are used (that we're talking about
eggs and not books, John and not the dog,
eating and not running). But a second part of
their meanings is the arrangement of these
words in structures. It is the structural
differences that give us the meaning
differences between making a statement or
asking a question or commanding (technically,
different mood choices).
• Similarly, structural differences are responsible
for the meaning differences between talking
about something that habitually happens,
versus something happening now, or in the
past (different verbal group patterns).
• (These structural differences underlie the need
for slight modifications to the verbal element
(eat) in order to express different meanings.)
 Extending language
• That the lexico-grammar provides language with
an in-built creative potential can be demonstrated
by attempting to extend language.
• Let us say that I want to make a new lexical
meaning. For instance, I invent a machine that
writes lectures automatically - you just feed in the
topic, a list of the main points, and then you
press a button and off it goes.
• How can I encode this new meaning in the
language?
• The first possible way is by inventing a totally new
word, i.e. by creating a new sign, an arbitrary
pairing of a content and an expression. For
example, suppose I decide to call my machine a
hoofer. Now how did I get this new word?
• I took a certain number of sounds of English and
arranged them in a novel way. However, it is
important to note that I did not take just any
sounds, nor did I arrange them in just any way.
For example, I could not have called my new
machine a hvristu, since HV is not an acceptable
sound sequence in English.
• Having 'coined' my new word in keeping
with the phonological rules of English (the
rules of the expression plane), it is now
available for use in structures:
• Although I only invented one word, I
automatically have a creative potential to
do a variety of new things with it. This
creative potential comes from the
grammar — the principles of coding for
English which allow us to turn a noun into
a verb, adjective, adverb, etc. and thus
use it in a range of structures to make
different meanings.
Simultaneous meanings in language

• Part, then, of what lexico-grammar does

for language is to give it a creative
potential: a way of creating new meanings,
by inventing new signs which then get
incorporated into the lexico-grammar of
the language, by simply arranging existing
signs in different ways, or by using existing
structures in atypical ways.
• However, there is significantly more to the
role of the lexico-gramrnar than this. For
not only does the grammar allow us to
make more meanings, to create, it also
allows us to mean more than one thing at
a time.
 Principles of grammatical analysis:
units and constituency
• Having established that it is the lexico-grammar which
gives language its creative potential, we will now focus
on how the lexico-grammar is organized so that its
creative potential can be exploited.
• There are two preliminary observations that we can
make of this level of lexico-grammar.
• The first is that we find a number of different kinds of
units. The second is that these units are related to
each other through constituency — smaller units make
up bigger units, and bigger units are made up of
smaller units.
 Constituent
• The boy loves the puppy.
• John loves the puppy
• The boy loves sport
• The boy sleeps

• The above substitution test demonstrates that the boy,

the puppy, and loves the puppy are all constituents of
this sentence. By this same test, we know that boy
loves is not a constituent of the sentence. There is no
single word that one could substitute that would make
The… the puppy an acceptable sentence.
• Syntactic constituents are said to be
hierarchically organized because they are
embedded in one another. For example,
the NP the puppy is part of the larger VP.
We say that the second NP is embedded
in the VP or that it is dominated by the VP.
These simple facts illustrate a fundamental
point about the organization of a sentence.
They claimed that Ian is brilliant.