Semantics: From meaning to text. Volume 3

This book presents an innovative approach to linguistic semantics, starting from the idea that language can be described as a mechanism for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms, or Texts. Semantics is that system of rules that ensures a transition from a Semantic Representation of the Meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep-Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in the terms of Meaning-Text linguistics, the present volume discusses several linguistic notions crucial to the development of Meaning-Text models of natural semantic/syntactic actants, government pattern, lexical functions, linguistic connotations, phrasemes, the meaning of grammatical cases, and linguistic dependencies; these notions are illustrated from a variety of languages. Reflecting the author’s life-long dedication to the study of the semantics and syntax of natural language, this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to linguistics, whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and computational linguists.