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
Igor Mel'?uk, Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte, Dept. of Linguistics and Translation, University of Montreal, Canada. |
