ABSTRACT
The term lexis, from the ancient Greek for ‘word’, refers to all the words in a language, the entire vocabulary of a language. Plato and Aristotle spoke of lexis in terms of how the words of a language can be used effectively. Plato focused on different types of diction and distinguished between mimesis, speech involving imitation, and diegisis, or simple narration not involving such imitation (see, for example, Gennette 1979). In his discussion of style in Rhetoric, Aristotle distinguished between lexis graphikê and lexis agonistikê, the former referring to ‘the most precise style … to be used in compositions designed for a careful reading’ and the latter, which consisted of two aspects (êthikê and pathêtikê), referring to ‘the style of plays written for a full performance on the stage as opposed to those designed for reading’ (Sonkowsky 1959: 260). InCategories, Aristotle also worked to describe numerous properties of words, including semantic properties of words (‘A man and an ox are both “animal”’), words that are synonymous, homonymous, and so forth (see Aristotle 350 BCE). Many of the important contributions of early Indian linguists, such as Pa-n. ini, Patañjali, and
Bhartrihari, concerned basic properties of words, including the notion of what is invariant (sphota) and what is variant (na-da) in words and other types of linguistic form. Such work also had an impact on Saussure, a professor of Sanskrit himself, and the development of structural linguistics. Consider, for example, the relationship between the notions of sphota and na-da and Saussure’s distinction between the ‘signifier’, or the (spoken or written) form of a word, and the ‘signified’, the mental concept of the word (Saussure 1916). In the history of modern linguistics, since approximately the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury, the treatment of lexis has evolved substantially by acknowledging to a greater degree the important and central role of words and lexicalized phrases in the mental representation of linguistic knowledge and in linguistic processing. Within generative linguistics, individual words and the syntactic constraints that they project have come to play an increasingly important role. For example, lexical structure needed to be ‘represented categorically at every syntactic level’ (Chomsky 1986) in generative-transformational grammar (e.g. the verb ‘throw’ requires a noun phrase, as in She threw the ball, as opposed to the ungrammatical *She threw). In cognitive linguistics, words and lexicalized chunks play a central role. As a final example, in
construction grammar, words and lexical phrases have taken center stage completely because words and lexicalized phrases, as well as syntactic frames in which lexical items can be inserted (e.g. X causes Y to … ), are viewed as form that can be attached to different types of meaning, blurring previously held distinctions between the domains of lexis and syntax. Linguists and psycholinguists who study lexis are in a unique position because they focus on the place in linguistic analysis and language processing where form (phonological or otherwise) meets meaning at the most basic level.
