Orð og tunga - 01.06.2006, Blaðsíða 48

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Orð og tunga
The core specifies the main semiotic coupling - form and sense. This
is enriched with as much general information concerning the word as
is possible given restrictions of space (the great proviso!).
Within modern linguistic theory, the role of the lexicon has been
very different. In Chomsky's (1957) earliest characterisation, no lexi-
con was necessary at all. Words were inserted into syntactic trees by
rewrite rules, as shown in Figure 1.
S NP VP
NP Det N
Det 4 the, a, some
N dog, cat, squirrel
VP V NP
V 4 chases, watches, eats
Figure 1: A simple rewrite rule grammar without lexicon
It was soon realised however that making the syntax do everything
weakened rather than strengthened it. The role of the syntax was to
express general principles of sentence organisation. Many aspects of
sentence form, though, are related to the idiosyncratic properties of
the words being used. In Chomsky's (1965) account, syntactic rules ex-
press exclusively syntactic generalisations (e.g. where do count nouns
go) and a lexicon is introduced which lists all the words of the lan-
guage, tagged with the syntactic information about them that must be
learned (and cannot simply be deduced).
The lexicon was thus introduced as a separate module of the gram-
mar, though its function was limited to that of a word store. From this
point on within Chomskean work, the lexicon served to list the id-
iosyncratic grammatical information which the word carried into the
sentence. Below are some examples of the kinds of grammatical infor-
mation that have been suggested.
Det N V NP
II I /\
a squirrel chases Det N