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.
