Language

Igor Mel’čuk is the author of 44 books and 270 papers on linguistics, including Dependency Syntax (1988), Cours de morphologie ge’ne’rale (5 volumes; 1992–2000), Aspects of the Theory of Morphology (2006), Introduction a la linguistique (3 volumes, coauthored with J. Milic’evic’; 2014), and Semantics (3 volumes; 2012–2104). He is Doctor Honoris Causa of the Besançon University (France), member of the Royal Society of Canada, and corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of two Killam Research Scholarships (1988 and 1989), a John Guggenheim Fellowship (1990), and the Alexander-von-Humboldt Research Award (1991). Mel’čuk was nominated to College de France in 1997 and to Chaire internationale Blaise Pascal (Ecole Normale Supe’rieure, France) in 2002. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Montreal.

“This book should be required reading for every linguist, and if you ’merely’ teach a language, you should read it, too. It presents an extraordinary model of how language works, and if you don’t know how language works, how on earth can you be a language teacher?"

• Contents Acknowledgments The Author’s Foreword Chapter 1. The Problem Stated 1.1 What is natural language and how to describe it? 1.2 Illustrations of some basic notions 1.3 The structure of this book 1.4 Limitations accepted Chapter 2. Functional Modeling in Linguistics 2.1 A model as a means of study and description 2.2 Functional models 2.3 The Meaning-Text model: a global functional linguistic model 2.3.1 Introductory remarks 2.3.2 Three postulates of the Meaning-Text theory 2.3.3 Main formal properties of a Meaning-Text model 2.3.4 Two central notions of the Meaning-Text approach: linguistic meaning and paraphrasing 2.3.5 General characterization of the Meaning-Text approach Chapter 3. An Outline of a Particular Meaning-Text Model 3.1 Deep and surface sublevels of linguistic representations 3.2 Linguistic representations in a Meaning-Text model 3.2.1 Introductory remarks 3.2.2 The semantic structure of a sentence 3.2.3 The deep-syntactic structure of a sentence 3.2.4 The surface-syntactic structure of a sentence 3.2.5 The deep-morphological structure of a sentence 3.2.6 The surface-morphological structure of a sentence 3.2.7 Prelinguistic representation of the world: conceptual representation 3.3 The modules of the Meaning-Text model 3.3.1 Introductory remarks 3.3.2 Semantic module 3.3.2.1 Semantic paraphrasing: rules of the form “SemRi ≡ SemRj” 3.3.2.2 Semantic transition: rules of the form “SemRi ⇔ DSyntRk” 3.3.2.3 Deep-syntactic paraphrasing: rules of the form “DSyntRk1 ≡ DSyntRk2” 3.3.3 Deep-syntactic module 3.3.4 Surface-syntactic module 3.3.5 Deep-morphological module 3.3.6 Surface-morphological module Chapter 4. Modeling Two Central Linguistic Phenomena: Lexical Selection and Lexical Cooccurrence 4.1 Modeling lexical selection (paradigmatics): semantic decompositions 4.2 Modeling lexical cooccurrence (syntagmatics): lexical functions 4.3 Correlations between paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects of lexeme behavior Chapter 5. Meaning-Text Linguistics 5.1 Meaning-Text linguistics and the direction of linguistic description: from meaning to text 5.1.1 Example 1: Spanish “semivowels” 5.1.2 Example 2: Russian binominative sentences 5.2 Meaning-Text linguistics and a linguistic conceptual apparatus 5.2.1 Introductory remarks 5.2.2 Linguistic sign 5.2.3 Word 5.2.4 Cases, ergative construction, voices 5.3 Meaning-Text linguistics and the description of linguistic meaning 5.4 Meaning-Text linguistics and the lexicon: the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary [= ECD] 5.4.1 Introductory remarks 5.4.2 The three main properties of an ECD 5.4.3 A lexical entry in an ECD: three major zones 5.4.3.1 The semantic zone in an ECD lexical entry 5.4.3.2 The syntactic cooccurrence zone in an ECD lexical entry 5.4.3.3 The semantic derivation and lexical cooccurrence zone in an ECD lexical entry 5.4.4 Two sample lexical entries of a Russian ECD 5.5 Meaning-Text linguistics and dependencies in natural language 5.5.1 Three types of linguistic dependency 5.5.2 Criteria for syntactic dependency Summing Up Appendices Appendix I : Phonetic Table Appendix II: Surface-Syntactic Relations of English Appendix III: Possible Combinations of the Three Types of Linguistic Dependency between Two Lexemes in a Clause Notes References Abbreviations and Notations Subject and Name Index with a Glossary Index of Languages