phrases become 'function' words ; that is to say, they acquire more
schematic, grammatical meanings which are different from, yet related
to, their original lexical meaning. For example, the original meaning of
'going to' in English refers to movement and travel. However, over time,
this phrase has acquired a much more comrllon grammdtical meaning
as an
indicator of future action.
Both cognitive grammar and SFG emphasise the fact that linguistic
meaning rypically operates at the level of the phrase rather than the
individual word. This idea is given even more prominence in the third
grammatical theory that we want to introduce here pattern grammar.
Pattern grammar is an approach to grammar derived from corpus
linguistics, the computer-assisted analysis of multi-million-word
databases (or' corpora') of authentic language data. (We will discuss
corpus linguisrics in detail in Chapter 10,) The basic idea of pattern
grammar is that most linguistic meanings reside neither in individual
words nor in the structures in which they appear, but in the combination
of the two. To illustrate this, consider the following twn sentences :
(a)
It's possible that she didn't get the message.
(b) It's possible to leave a message.