An Advanced Introduction to Semantics
A Meaning-Text Approach

Presents, in simple and clear terms, the way in which humans express their ideas by talking.

Igor Mel'?uk (Author), Jasmina Mili?evi? (Author)

9781108481625, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 April 2020

450 pages, 118 b/w illus. 26 tables
23.4 x 15.7 x 2.8 cm, 0.75 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Computational linguistics [CFX], Lexicography [CFM], Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Linguistics [CF]