Confusing Lexical And Grammatical Word

Fawcett (2010: 231):

The position is therefore that the traditional 'word class' labels are sometimes used when talking about the sets of items that expound certain elements of structure. However, it is an interesting fact that they simply have no role to play as a category that is required in the generative version of the grammar. In other words, the lowest element of structure in a tree diagram is not filled by a word class label, but is instead directly expounded by an item. For example, we say that the head of a given nominal group is expounded by the item boy, and not that it is filled by a noun and that this noun is then expounded the item boy.

 

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From the perspective of SFL Theory, this confuses the word as grammatical rank with the word as lexical item. As a grammatical rank, the word is a constituent of a group/phrase and is constituted by morphemes. As a lexical item, a word is the synthetic realisation of the most delicate lexicogrammatical features, just as the phoneme /b/ is the synthetic realisation of the phonological features [bilabial, voiced, stop]. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 568-9):

The folk notion of the “word” is really a conflation of two different abstractions, one lexical and one grammatical.

(i) Vocabulary (lexis): the word as lexical item, or "lexeme". This is construed as an isolate, a 'thing' that can be counted and sorted in (alphabetical) order. People "look for" words, they "put thoughts into" them, "put them into" or "take them out of another's", and nowadays they keep collections of words on their shelves or in their computers in the form of dictionaries. Specialist knowledge is thought of as a matter of terminology. The taxonomic organisation of vocabulary is less exposed: it is made explicit in Roget's Thesaurus, but is only implicit in a standard dictionary. Lexical taxonomy was the first area of language to be systematically studied by anthropologists, when they began to explore cultural knowledge as it is embodied in folk taxonomies of plants, animals, diseases and the like. 

(ii) Grammar: the word as one of the ranks in the grammatical system. This is, not surprisingly, where Western linguistic theory as we know it today began in classical times, with the study of words varying in form according to their case, number, aspect, person etc.. Word-based systems such as these do provide a way in to studying grammatical semantics: but the meanings they construe are always more complex than the categories that appear as formal variants, and grammarians have had to become aware of covert patterns.

From this perspective, the Cardiff Grammar proposes that a lexical item (boy) realises a group rank function (head of a nominal group) instead of a bundle of the most delicate lexicogrammatical features.

As previously observed, exponency ('expound') was a feature of Halliday's superseded theory, Scale-&-Category Grammar, where, in terms of SFL Theory, it was used for both realisation and instantiation.