Language : : From Meaning to Text / / Igor Mel'čuk; David Beck.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter ASP eBook Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Mel'čuk, Igor,
• Author: Mel'čuk, Igor,; Beck, David,
• HerausgeberIn: Beck, David,
• Place / Publishing House: Boston, MA : : Academic Studies Press, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (270 p.)

This volume presents a sketch of the Meaning-Text linguistic approach, richly illustrated by examples borrowed mainly, but not exclusively, from English. Chapter 1 expounds the basic idea that underlies this approach-that a natural language must be described as a correspondence between linguistic meanings and linguistic texts-and explains the organization of the book. Chapter 2 introduces the notion of linguistic functional model, the three postulates of the Meaning-Text approach (a language is a particular meaning-text correspondence, a language must be described by a functional model and linguistic utterances must be treated at the level of the sentence and that of the word) and the perspective "from meaning to text" for linguistic descriptions. Chapter 3 contains a characterization of a particular Meaning-Text model: formal linguistic representations on the semantic, the syntactic and the morphological levels and the modules of a linguistic model that link these representations. Chapter 4 covers two central problems of the Meaning-Text approach: semantic decomposition and restricted lexical cooccurrence (≈ lexical functions); particular attention is paid to the correlation between semantic components in the definition of a lexical unit and the values of its lexical functions. Chapter 5 discusses five select issues: 1) the orientation of a linguistic description must be from meaning to text (using as data Spanish semivowels and Russian binominative constructions); 2) a system of notions and terms for linguistics (linguistic sign and the operation of linguistic union; notion of word; case, voice, and ergative construction); 3) formal description of meaning (strict semantic decomposition, standardization of semantemes, the adequacy of decomposition, the maximal block principle); 4) the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (with a sample of complete lexical entries for Russian vocables); 5) dependencies in language, in particular-syntactic dependencies (the criteria for establishing a set of surface-syntactic relations for a language are formulated). Three appendices follow: a phonetic table, an inventory of surface-syntactic relations for English and an overview of all possible combinations of the three types of dependency (semantic, syntactic, and morphological). The book is supplied with a detailed index of notions and terms, which includes a linguistic glossary.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- The Author's Foreword -- Chapter 1. The Problem Stated -- Chapter 2. Functional Modeling in Linguistics -- Chapter 3. An Outline of a Particular Meaning-Text Model -- Chapter 4. Modeling Two Central Linguistic Phenomena: Lexical Selection and Lexical Cooccurrence -- Chapter 5. Meaning-Text Linguistics -- Summing Up -- Appendices -- Notes -- References -- Abbreviations and Notations -- Subject and Name Index with a Glossary -- Index of Languages