An Advanced Introduction to Semantics

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.

Igor Mel'čuk is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Université de Montréal. One of the pioneers of Machine-Translation research, he launched, together with A. Zholkovsky, the Meaning-Text linguistic approach – a universal linguistic theory.

Jasmina Milićević is Associate Professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. She is co-author of the three-volume Introduction à la linguistique (2014) with Igor Mel'čuk.