Language

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.