How to handle lexical semantics in SFL: a corpus study of purposes for using size adjectives

In the systemic framework, lexis has received little attention in comparison to grammar. The paper compares existing systemic approaches to lexis and outlines a model for describing lexical items from the viewpoint of realization of communicative intentions by lexical items using the systemic network of lexical choices. As an example of the approach, the paper attempts to describe contrastive lexical semantics for a set of words, namely, size adjectives in English, German and Russian. Unlike several other treatments, which focused mostly on physical properties of objects designated by size adjectives, for instance, works by Bierwisch and Tucker, the proposed model accounts for basic purposes with which size adjectives are used. First, the investigation goes beyond physical properties of objects, since size adjectives are used for many different purposes, including specification of intensity, number of elements, importance, etc (statistically, they are more frequent than spatial uses). Second, size adjectives are chosen by the speaker to achieve a rhetorical impact on the hearer, so the investigation goes beyond specifying ideational properties alone. The paper considers the use of the systemic network for studying translation equivalence between uses of size adjectives in the three languages by comparing combinations of features in the network for respective translations.