I’m looking for information about the linguists and/or researchers from before the 1970s who at the time believed that vocabulary and grammar should be taught as two completely separate entities, that these two were not at all dependent on each other.
I know that this belief started to change during the 1970s, but that’s all I know about the shift, so I would like to know more about the linguists who believed that vocabulary and grammar were unconnected so that I can better understand their point of view and then what happened to change prevailing opinion about this in the linguistic community.
If anyone can tell me names of these linguists or references to their works that would account for them, that would be great, and I’ll go figure it out myself. If anybody knows the actual reasoning here and can provide that as a concrete answer, that would be even better.
lexical' with
semantic', and he showed that it was both possible and useful to make formal statements about lexical items and their relations.’ (Halliday 1966:148). Lexis was being recognised as an autonomous level of language.