Igor Mel'cuk – författare

The book is dedicated to linguistic morphology and it contains a sketch of a complete morphological theory, centered around a discussion of fundamental concepts such as morph vs. morpheme, inflectional category, voice, grammatical case, agreement vs. government, suppletion, relationships between linguistic signs, etc.: the hottest issues in modern linguistics!The book introduces rigorous and clear concepts necessary to describe morphological phenomena of natural languages. Among other things, it offers logical calculi of possible grammemes in a given category. The presentation is developed in a typological perspective, so that linguistic data from a large variety of languages are described and analyzed (about 100 typologically very different languages).The main method is deductive: the concepts proposed in Aspects of the Theory of Morphology are based on a small set of indefinibilia and each concept is defined in terms of these indefinibilia and/or other concepts defined previously; as a result, logical calculi can be constructed (similar to Mendeleev's Periodical Table of Elements in chemistry). Then the concept is applied to the actual linguistic data to demonstrate its validity and advantages.Thus, Aspects of the Theory of Morphology combines metalinguistic endeavor (a system of concepts for morphology) with typological and descriptive orientation. It reaches out to all students of language, including the border fields and applications.

The monograph presents the Meaning-Text approach applied to the domain of syntax from a typological angle; it deals with several long-standing syntactic problems on the basis of a dependency description.Its content can be presented in five parts + an Introduction:The Introduction explains the architecture of the book and sketches the Meaning-Text linguis-tic model, underlying the subsequent discussion.I. Surface-syntactic relations in the languages of the world, with special studies of subjects and objects.II. Grammatical voice in the dependency framework: the “passive” construction in Chinese.III. The relative clause: a calculus and analysis of possible types; the pseudo-relative (“headless”) clause.IV. Binary conjunctions (such as IF …, THEN …), free indefinite pronouns ([He went] nobody knows where), and syntactic idioms.V. Word order: linearization of dependency structures.The monograph offers a new perspective in syntactic studies. It is strongly typology-oriented (using the data from typologically diverse languages: English, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Basque, Georgian, etc.) and based on a system of rigorous definitions of the notions involved, which ensures a link with computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing

The monograph presents the Meaning-Text approach applied to the domain of syntax from a typological angle; it deals with several long-standing syntactic problems on the basis of a dependency description.Its content can be presented in five parts + an Introduction:The Introduction explains the architecture of the book and sketches the Meaning-Text linguis-tic model, underlying the subsequent discussion.I. Surface-syntactic relations in the languages of the world, with special studies of subjects and objects.II. Grammatical voice in the dependency framework: the “passive” construction in Chinese.III. The relative clause: a calculus and analysis of possible types; the pseudo-relative (“headless”) clause.IV. Binary conjunctions (such as IF …, THEN …), free indefinite pronouns ([He went] nobody knows where), and syntactic idioms.V. Word order: linearization of dependency structures.The monograph offers a new perspective in syntactic studies. It is strongly typology-oriented (using the data from typologically diverse languages: English, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Basque, Georgian, etc.) and based on a system of rigorous definitions of the notions involved, which ensures a link with computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing