94 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
Hunston and Francis (ibid. 243), however, recognize that an N element
prospects a subsequent V element and state:
Fact, then, prospects two things – the that-clause, and the following verb- and one prospection is put on hold while the other is fulfi lled.
Combining Hunston and Francis’s work with that of Brazil, at least in
theory, allows for a more complete grammar of used language to emerge.
However, until more work has been done in identifying patterns it will not
be possible to integrate the two theories in practice.
4.3 Units of Selection
Brazil’s grammar codes used language as chains of lexical elements, which
unfold in time and serve to meet communicative needs. Brazil (1995)
apparently considers the orthographic word to be the appropriate slot fi ll-
ing element.^9 Thus, it appears that he would code example (15) as:
(15) It’s raining cats and dogs.
N V V' N & N rather than as
N PHR-V^10Carter (1987: 5) recognizes that while to rain cats and dogs consists of
more than one orthographic word, it is a ‘lexeme’: a unit which cannot
be decomposed into its constituent orthographic words without loss of
meaning; it represents a single sense selection. Numerous scholars in
the fi elds of second language acquisition and psycholinguistics. such as
Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992: 1), Pawley and Syder (1983: 205), McCarthy
(1990: 5–10), Melcˇuk (1995) (cited in Hunston and Francis 2000: 7–9) and
Moon (1992) argue that some lexical phrases are stored in the lexicon as
single elements. All seemingly recognize to rain cats and dogs as an idiom
and hence a single lexical element which for the purposes of discourse
analysis should no more be decomposed into its component parts than
the lexical element worker should be decomposed into its two constituent
morphemes work and er.
However, there is disagreement in the literature as to what is and
what isn’t a single lexical item. Wray (2002: 9) lists 58 terms found in
the literature which describe lexical items containing more than one
orthographic word and cautions that the terms are not all synonymous.