| The principal objectives of this study are (1) to assess the status of lexicon in the overall grammatical system of a language, and (2) to demonstrate how a lexicological study might be applied to such language-related activities as lexicography, translation and vocabulary teaching.;A small number of English perception verbs are chosen for analysis because they are related in a highly systematic way. These verbs can be divided according to the five perceptual modes as follows: (1) visual: see, look (at) and look; (2) auditory: hear, listen (to) and sound; (3) olfactory: smell, smell and smell; (4) gustatory: taste, taste and taste; (5) tactile: feel, feel and feel.;It is further argued that for semantic and syntactic reasons this basic paradigm should be extended to cover the sixth mode of perception: (6) mental: think, think (about) and seem.;Although there are six aspects of a lexical unit--phonological, graphological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic--the study is confined to certain issues in the areas of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.;The approach in this study is practical, and the methodology eclectic. The issues for discussion are chosen with a view to possible applications of the findings. Among the linguistic models adopted are the case grammar matrix model for verb classification, the familiar type of transformational generative grammar for syntactic analysis, and a complementarist model for pragmatics. The data are from three major sources: (a) linguistic and philosophical literature on perception verbs, (b) the Standard Sample of Present-Day Edited American English, for Use with Digital Computers and (c) a selected number of British and American dictionaries of English.;From the analysis of these perception verbs, it is concluded that the lexicon is not an unordered list of lexical units. Rather, it is a complex network of lexical natural classes (one of which is the class of perception verbs). Since it interacts with all the other components of the grammar, the lexicon really deserves much more attention than it has hitherto received in the traditional mainstream of linguistics. |
