An Advanced Introduction to Semantics: A Meaning-Text Approach

by Igor Mel'cuk, Jasmina Milicevic

Overview

This book is an advanced introduction to semantics that presents this crucial component of human language through the lens of the 'Meaning-Text' theory - an approach that treats linguistic knowledge as a huge inventory of correspondences between thought and speech. Formally, semantics is viewed as an organized set of rules that connect a representation of meaning (Semantic Representation) to a representation of the sentence (Deep-Syntactic Representation). The approach is particularly interesting for computer assisted language learning, natural language processing and computational lexicography, as our linguistic rules easily lend themselves to formalization and computer applications. The model combines abstract theoretical constructions with numerous linguistic descriptions, as well as multiple practice exercises that provide a solid hands-on approach to learning how to describe natural language semantics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108481625
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/02/2020
Pages:	450
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Igor Mel'čuk is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Université de Montréal. One of the pioneers of Machine-Translation research, he launched, together with A. Zholkovsky, the Meaning-Text linguistic approach – a universal linguistic theory.

Jasmina Milićević is Associate Professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. She is co-author of the three-volume Introduction à la linguistique (2014) with Igor Mel'čuk.

Table of Contents

Part I. Fundamentals: 1. Semantics in language and linguistics; 2. Some basic linguistic notions; Part II. Meaning in Language and Its Description: 3. Linguistic meaning; 4. Lexical meaning, lexical items and lexical units; 5. Lexicographic definition; 6. Lexical relations; 7. Lexical functions; 8. The lexical stock of a language and the dictionary; 9. Sentential meaning and meaning relations between sentences; Part III. Meaning-Text Model of Semantics: 10. Semantic representation; 11. Deep-syntactic representation; 12. Semantic rules; Concluding remarks; Appendix: some mathematical and logical notions useful to linguistics; Exercises; References; Notion and term index cum glossary; Definition index; Language index; Lexical unit and semanteme index.

Editorial Reviews

'A practical and comprehensive approach to the description and analysis of linguistic meaning bridging the narrow interests of traditional formal theories and the looser approaches to semantic representation favoured by usage-based and typologically oriented researchers. The authors systematically introduce a rigorous and intuitively accessible approach to the representation of the meaning of words and sentences that is urgently needed by linguists interested in the description of language, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and computational linguists in search of formalizable tools for the modelling of the semantics of natural language.' David Beck, University of Alberta

From the Publisher