The Neo – Firthian School

The Neo – Firthian School:

The theory of "systemic grammar" is formulated as a scheme of interrelated categories, set up in order to account for the data, and a number of scales of abstraction to relate the categories to the data and to each other. These theoretical categories and scales of abstraction are used to describe language at different levels of linguistic analysis.

Lexis: This level is concerned with studying the lexical items, from which a given text is composed. A lexical item is not necessarily a single word, but any meaningful lexical unit regardless of its grammatical specification, for instance, idioms and proverbs. The categories that are proposed for the study of lexis are (Collocation & Lexical set).

Collocation: Two lexical items are considered to be collocationally related if they are habitually associated with each other, and whenever one is seen in any linguistic environment, the other is expected to co-occur.

Linguists introduce three important terms to analyze patterns of collocation; (nodal item or node, collocate, and collocational range) for example the item "economy" is the node, and items such as "affairs, policy, program, disaster" are called collocates, the list of collocates of the nodal items constitutes its collocational range.

The collocates may be either contiguous or discontiguous to the nodal item, it may occur side by side with it or may be separated, also it may precede the node or follow it.