5.2. Lexicology vs. Syntax (grammar)

   Grammar is known to be the earliest among linguistic studies. The first books on linguistics which appeared in ancient times were grammar books (e.g. Ars Grammatica by Eliy Donat (Rome, IV с. AD). Thus, grammatical relations were studied much earlier than lexical and semantic and the links between grammar and lexicology are very old, deep and various.

   It is common knowledge that the focus of grammar study is forms of words (morphology) and forms of word combinations (syntax).

   Words, as was already noted, seldom occur in isolation. They are usually arranged in certain patterns which show the relations between the things they stand for.  As a basic assumption, we believe that we might know all the words in an English dictionary and still be unable to speak or to understand the language. Consequently, to say that a person ‘knows‘ English, presupposes that they know some rules of combining words into sentences, which are known as the rules of syntax.

   The relationship between lexicology and syntax is far from straightforward, however. For example, the famous sentence ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’, suggested by Chomsky (1957), though undoubtedly well-formed syntactically, is lexically nonsensical, as it runs counter to what we know about the world. So, alongside with a lexical meaning, words have to have some grammatical meaning as well. The two kinds of meaning are often interdependent.

   Thus, the verb to have can realize its different meanings only depending on the syntactical function it performs in a sentence. In the sentence He has connections in high places, we understand that the verb to have is used in the sense that something is available for somebody to use, which is an extension of the verb’s primary meaning of owning something. In another sentence, They’ve been having fights over money, the verb to have is used in the meaning of “experiencing; going through something”. On the other hand, a more divergent use of to have is evident in the sentence He has arrived (has lost his way, had phoned, had missed the bus), where it functions as an auxiliary to form Perfect tenses. In yet another sentence, He has to look for funding to continue research (to revise for the exam, to stay at home for the weekend), to have is used to express modality – if you have to do something, you must do it because it is necessary or because somebody forces you to do it. The latter two cases are a vivid illustration of the grammatical, rather than lexical use of to have. So are the sentences He had his tooth filled and She has had her house broken into, where the grammatical meaning clearly overrides the lexical one in the semantic structure of the verb to have, which – in the construction to have s/th done (for you) – means “to pay a professional person to do some work for you” or “to have a misfortune befall you”. When the grammatical meaning takes over, the primary lexical meaning of the lexical item – at least in one of the senses – is considerably weakened, often to the point of a complete loss. This route of development of a word’s meaning is known under the term grammaticalization – a process whereby lexical items develop grammatical functions and lose all or part of their lexical meaning – and a more detailed discussion of it will follow later in the book. We are using it here to make an argument that the two kinds of meaning – lexical and grammatical – are inextricably linked and mutually dependent on each other, since both of them make up the word meaning and neither can exist without the other. Even though lexical semantics traditionally focuses on content words, such words cannot be studied on their own, i.e. in an agrammatical vacuum. Some lexical properties, like certain aspects of verbs’ meanings, have effects throughout the sentence. So, for instance, a difference between the verbs spot and see can be described in terms of aspectual properties of the verbs: spot describes a punctual event, while see does not. This in turn affects which tense and aspect markers² can be present in the same clause and how such markers are interpreted. So, I saw the bird all day long can describe a continuous seeing event, while I spotted the bird all day long must be interpreted as repeated instances of spotting events. These verbs’ semantics, therefore, has an effect on the grammatical reading of a sentence: it affects the category of aspect, which is part of the syntax of a sentence. In view of this, most linguists agree that it is impossible to say where the lexicon ends, and syntax begins [Hollmann : 526].

   Similarly, instances are not few when the syntactic position of a word or group of words does not only change its functions but the lexical meaning as well. An adjective and a noun element of the same group can more or less naturally change places as in the example:

Venetian blind – blind Venetian

boat house – house boat

racing horse – horse racing

virus killer – killer virus

   These pairs of noun combinations by virtue of a small structural change, notably inversion, are quite distinct semantically: a Venetian blind is not the same as a blind Venetian. The difference can be clearly seen from the lexicographical interpretation: horse racing means “a competition or an election, in which horses with riders race against each other” [LDOCE], while racing horse has the meaning of “a horse bred to go very fast and be used for racing” [LDOCE].  As to the last pair, virus killer can mean a computer software program which eliminates viruses, while killer virus has the meaning of a deadly virus, a pathogen that kills, e.g. HIV-AIDs, Ebola etc. This is even more so for fixed noun phrases, such as salt and pepper, for example. The ordering of elements within a phrase like this is crucial as salt and pepper has the meaning of “condiments”, but if it is reversed to pepper and salt, the meaning changes to “graying”, as in ‘pepper-and-salt hair’³. Shifts in syntactical patterns, therefore, affect lexical semantics, which proves yet again a correlation between lexical and grammatical meaning in the semantic structure of words. The inextricable unity of syntax and lexicon led M.Halliday to introduce the term lexicogrammar, thus collapsing the usual distinction between the two.