ABSTRACT
Everyone is familiar with dictionaries. They present what purports to be a list of the practical totality of the words, often with commonly used phrases, in a given language at a particular time (and some include archaic words and senses). This totality is known as the lexis of a language (adj. lexical). For reasons of educational bias (for instance, the paramount use that students make of dictionaries and lexically arranged encyclopedias), people are far more directly aware of individual words than of other units and structures of language. In particular, mentioning ‘meaning’ or the semantic properties of languages (and therefore also of texts) tends to evoke first and foremost the level of individual words. Yet meanings are certainly not exclusively concentrated in words individually. Any text shows that the combination of words (and their use in contexts) creates meanings that the individual words do not possess in isolation, and even meanings that are not wholly predictable from the literal senses of the words combined.
