Describing Language: Form and Function - The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan Vol 5 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
Chapter 7: Lending and Borrowing: From Grammar to Lexis [1985]
Describing Language: Form and Function - The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan Vol 5 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
Ruqaiya Hasan† [+]
Macquarie University
Ruqaiya Hasan, who died in 2015, was a professor of linguistics who taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation.
Read her obituary here
Description
A lexical item does not have a mysterious, sui generis existence, and the task of grammar vis à vis lexis is not simply to determine the syntactic classification of items. Rather the meaning of a lexical item is constructed by the grammar. The word pairs “lend” and “borrow”, and “sell” and “buy”, illustrate Hasan’s point that they mean what they mean because of the way they are used – because of the constructions in which they appear.