Universal Semantic Syntax

Syntactic theory has been dominated in the last decades by theories that disregard semantics in their approach to syntax. Presenting a truly semantic approach to syntax this book takes as its primary starting point the idea that syntax deals with the relations between meanings expressed by form-meaning elements and that the same types of relations can be found cross-linguistically. The theory provides a way to formalize the syntactic relations between meanings so that each fragment of grammar can be analyzed in a clear-cut way. A comprehensive introduction into the theoretical concepts of the theory is provided with analyzes of numerous examples in English and various other languages European and non-European to illustrate the concepts. The theory discussed will enable linguists to look for similarities between languages while at the same time acknowledging important language specific features.