Shedding light on SHED, CAST and THROW as nodes of extended lexical units

Considering linguistic form and meaning as two facets of the same phenomenon has been the fundamental assumption behind corpus work on phraseology. This systematic interconnection was originally proposed by Firth and then adopted by Sinclair to become the basis of the theoretical framework he developed. Such a view of language has important implications with regard to analyzing and describing meaning, in that first ‘given certain formal parameters in the context of a word, it is possible to arrive at a reliable meaning by formalizing the evidence of language usage’ and second ‘a variation in the formal profile of a word or an expression will always lead us to a change of meaning’ (Tognini-Bonelli 2002:76). In the light of corpus evidence, Sinclair challenged in the light of corpus evidence the traditional association of the unit of meaning with the word and postulated a redefinition of it (1991, 1996, 1998), based on collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody. This new kind of unit is called ‘extended’, because although it is described by means of using a word (or phrase) as a starting point, it is ultimately defined by the observed interrelation of the node and its context. Tognini-Bonelli (2001) defines meaning as ‘function in context’ and stresses the fact that it is essential for the extended unit of meaning to have reached its pragmatic function in order to be considered as ‘functionally complete’ (id.:19), which in turn draws attention to semantics and pragmatics as forming a continuum.