Mel'cuk Igor Mel'cuk, Beck David Beck (EDT), Polguere Alain Polguere (EDT) Semantics

Annotation

This book presents an innovative and novel approach to linguistic semantics, starting from the idea that language can be described as a mechanism for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms, or Texts. Semantics is specifically that system of rules that ensures a transition from a Semantic Representation of the Meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep-Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in the terms of Meaning-Text linguistics, the present volume closes the publication of the three volume series. It discusses in detail several linguistic notions crucial to the development of Meaning-Text models of natural languages: semantic and syntactic actants, government pattern, lexical functions, linguistic connotations, phrasemes, the meaning of grammatical cases, and linguistic dependencies. The notions under analysis are illustrated from a variety of languages. Reflecting the author's life-long dedication to the study of the semantics and syntax of natural language, this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the language sciences, whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and computational linguists.