Interactive lexis: prominence and paradigms 203sense of item slots) but sense slots, and that any item substituted for
another in a non-prominent slot will be projected by the speaker (and,
crucially, perceived by the listener) as largely synonymous with the item
substituted. The existential paradigm is not a set of linguistic items but a
set of ‘mutually incompatible senses’ (Brazil 1985:56). Thus, in (6), the
alternatives are synonymous.
6 Q: Who sent you away?
insolent
R: A(n) cheeky ofFICial
bolshy
The three choices are ‘equally available words not representing sense choices’
(ibid.). If there is anything to choose between the items (e.g. a different age
group or social group’s preference) then these will be choices of ‘modes of
expression’ rather than sense choices (ibid.:58) and they further underline
the shifting, social nature of the paradigms.
Logically, if speakers project items as being selective or non-selective
from paradigms, then we should expect occurrences where items are signalled
as non-synonymous, where it is semantic distinctions that are important,
and anticipate utterances such as:
7 he WASn’t merely CHEEky, he was DOWNright INsolent
Such an utterance sounds quite uncontroversial, and indeed this deliberate
search for precision, the rejection of an item as inadequate to one’s
meaning and the clear signalling of the increment of meaning that one
item can offer over another, has informed the debate on ‘metalinguistic
negation’ which is addressed in Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1971) and, latterly,
Horn (1985).
Naturally occurring discourse may therefore be predicted to contain, by
virtue of the interactive nature of the paradigms, not only the conventional
lexical relations inherent in a decontextualized description of the language
but existentially valid relations, including relations ‘not necessarily [those]
customarily thought to inhere in the abstract lexicon of the language’
(Brazil 1985:55). Lexical studies needs must take such a dimension into
account and (a) examine large amounts of data to ratify the implications
of Brazil’s theory, and (b) incorporate categories into lexical theory that
can accommodate the singular nature of lexical discourse relations which
cannot easily be captured by the tools of conventional lexicology and
lexical semantics. One does not in fact have to look far for substantiating
data. The remainder of this chapter will refer to conversational data from
the Survey of Spoken English (hereinafter SSE) available in published
form in Svartvik and Quirk (1980) and in Crystal and Davy (1975). The
samples are representative of a larger collection extracted from some 17,000
tone units of SSE data, a full report of which has been published elsewhere
(McCarthy 1988). The existential level of lexical relations observable in