An Advanced Introduction to Semantics: A Meaning-Text Approach

Description

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.

Igor Mel'cuk is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Universite de Montreal. One of the pioneers of Machine-Translation research, he launched, together with A. Zholkovsky, the Meaning-Text linguistic approach - a universal linguistic theory. Jasmina Milicevic is Associate Professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. She is co-author of the three-volume Introduction a la linguistique (2014) with Igor Mel'cuk.

'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