Wow! eBook
Semantics: From meaning to text. Volume 1: 129
Author(s): Igor Mel’čuk (Author), David Beck (Editor), Alain Polguère (Editor)
- Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co
- Publication Date: 6 Jun. 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 458 pages
- ISBN-10: 9027205965
- ISBN-13: 9789027205964
Book Description
This book presents an innovative and novel approach to linguistic semantics, beginning with the idea that language can be described as a system for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms or Texts. Semantics is specifically that system of rules that ensures a correct 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, this volume discusses in detail the problems of Semantic Representation ―including the semantic structure of utterances, the semantics of Causation in English, and communicative, or information, structure. Based on 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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Mel’čuk is both creative and not afraid to take a non-mainstream stance. Though MTT remains relatively obscure to many researches for various reasons, we have good reasons to foresee a better understanding from a wider audience. A tremendous contribution in the field, this book will in due course prove itself to be well worth reading and will yield more significant and far-reaching theoretical and empirical results. Those unaccustomed to formalism will find it a great illustration of accurate description of a wide range of linguistic phenomena. And the formal schools will find in SMT an utterly novel design since current semantic theories are centered on truth-conditional logic. Semantics: From meaning to text is thus strongly recommendable to those interested in natural language processing, machine translation, lexicography, lexicon, semiotics, anthropology or semantics per se. Open-minded scholars in both theoretical and applied linguistics can cross the boundary and listen to Mel’čuk ‘s unique voice. — Hongxin Zhang and Haitao Liu, in Journal of Linguistics 49(3): 710 – 715, 2013
