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Presents, in simple and clear terms, the way in which humans express their ideas by talking.
List 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.
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.
Summary
Aimed primarily at graduate level students and researchers, this textbook presents a model of semantics that forms a central component of human language: it explains how people create sentences based on pre-constructed and formally represented meanings.
Additional text
'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
