Meaning-Text Theory Research Articles

Contrasting Relativization in some Naomi Alderman’s Novels and their French Translation from a Syntactic and a Semantic Perspectives

Language in usage is the result of various operations. Linguistic operations are worth studying so as to uncover the subtleties which make languages to be unique in their inner organization. These operations occur within various linguistic units (words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, and texts) and can be studied at various levels of linguistic analysis (Dutoit, 2000). Provided the wide range of such operations, the notion of clause operations is therefore the subject of this article; more specifically, this study intends to contrast relativization from a syntactic and semantic point of view based on an English-French translation corpus (extracted from three novels by Naomi Alderman and their French translations). With the aid of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT), the findings suggest that there are convergent and divergent syntactic properties, shared syntactic processes, and common syntactic functions related to the translational renderings of relative markers. Moreover, the contrastive analysis of relativization from a semantic viewpoint reveals some semantic functions undertaken by relative markers, some correspondence types between relatives of different versions of the corpus, and some translation procedures used by translators while rendering the overall meaning of the source text.

An explanatory combinatorial dictionary of English conflict lexis: A case study of modern political discourse

Though political discourse is in the mainstream of modern studies, scholars haven’t so far paid much attention to compiling political discourse-oriented dictionaries. The need to further develop lexicographic theory and practice for specific purposes and advance new methods to dictionary making is a challenge that linguists are facing today. The aim of the case study is twofold: to work out the principles for making an Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (ECD) of English political conflict lexis and the microstructure of an ECD entry. The source of the data is the NOW corpus; the material is current American political discourse (2022). The ECD is generally consistent with Mel'čuk’s Meaning-Text theory (MTT). The authors describe a process of collecting and processing the data: corpus search and analysis, automatic and manual text processing, glossary compilation with the use of lexicographic, semasiological, and etymological methods and present an example of an ECD entry consisting of semantic, phonological, and cooccurrence zones. The findings prove that the use of electronic text corpora offers an effective way for compiling a specialized discourse-based dictionary. The research illustrates the validity of MTT: though based on the data of “language in context” , the dictionary is synthesis-oriented: it aims at speech production. The paper is the first result of a bigger project sketching the overall framework of the discursive ECD of political conflict lexis, which subsequent studies will hopefully develop with more precision and detail. The dictionary will be helpful for scholars in linguistics, discourse analysis, media and communication, political science, and conflict studies.

Meaning and function of Spanish formulemes and pragmatemes vs. illocutionary verbs

From the perspective of Pragmatics, some scholars claim that the taxonomy of illocutionary acts should be revised. The aim of this paper is to propose such a review by means of a research field in which Lexicography and Pragmatics overlap. As we attempt to prove, formulemes offer the advantage of being a narrower field of study than free utterances. Formulemes ( Have a nice day! ) have been defined within the Meaning Text-Theory as a type of cliché and Pragmatemes ( Happy birthday! ) as a type of formuleme more restricted by the extralinguistic situation (someone’s birthday). E-dictionaries require a formal method to express both the meaning and the function of formulemes, yet this lexicographic development may well elicit problems. Within Meaning-Text Theory pragmatemes have been formalized to date by Lexical Functions. However, we have observed that this tool is unsatisfactory for didactic purposes. Therefore, in the Spanish e-dictionary Diretes , we have attached each formuleme to one illocutionary verb that we call “Pragmatic Function” (such as to wish and to congratulate for the examples above). In order to identify whether a formalization by means of Pragmatic Functions could be both possible and successful, we have formalized more than two hundred formulemes (sixty of them pragmatemes). Although the project is in progress, up to now any kind of formuleme (being or not pragmateme) was successfully analyzed by means of thirty Pragmatic Functions created ad hoc . Pragmatic Functions could be useful not only for the formalization of formulemes and pragmatemes when teaching Spanish, but also to revise the list of illocutionary verbs from the perspective of Phraseology and Lexicography.

Paraphrase and parallel treebank for the comparison of French and Chinese syntax

AbstractThis paper proposes to study the contrastive syntax of French and Chinese through the lens of syntactic mismatches, and by making use of parallel treebanks. A syntactic mismatch is the non-similarity between the syntactic structures of one linguistic unit and its translation. Syntactic mismatches are formalized using the notion of paraphrase from the Meaning-Text Theory, which allows for capturing mismatches at different levels of the linguistic description (e.g. Semantic, Deep-Syntactic, and Surface-Syntactic). In this paper, we report in details on the types of paraphrases found in the seed corpus used, demonstrating that the Deep-Syntactic paraphrases constitute the best starting point for our study. Then, we show how, starting from the seed corpus, we semi-automatically constructed a multi-layer parallel treebank with the alignment and annotation of paraphrases.

The Information Structure–prosody interface in text-to-speech technologies. An empirical perspective

Abstract The correspondence between the communicative intention of a speaker in terms of Information Structure and the way this speaker reflects communicative aspects by means of prosody have been a fruitful field of study in Linguistics. However, text-to-speech applications still lack the variability and richness found in human speech in terms of how humans display their communication skills. Some attempts were made in the past to model one aspect of Information Structure, namely thematicity for its application to intonation generation in text-to-speech technologies. Yet, these applications suffer from two limitations: (i) they draw upon a small number of made-up simple question-answer pairs rather than on real (spoken or written) corpus material; and (ii) they do not explore whether any other interpretation would better suit a wider range of textual genres beyond dialogs. In this paper, two different interpretations of thematicity in the field of speech technologies are examined: the state-of-art binary (and flat) theme-rheme, and the hierarchical thematicity defined by Igor Mel’čuk within the Meaning-Text Theory. The outcome of the experiments on a corpus of native speakers of US English suggests that the latter interpretation of thematicity has a versatile implementation potential for text-to-speech applications of the Information Structure–prosody interface.

A study of lexical function detection with word2vec and supervised machine learning

In this work, we report the results of our experiments on the task of distinguishing the semantics of verb-noun collocations in a Spanish corpus. This semantics was represented by four lexical functions of the Meaning-Text Theory. Each lexical function specifies a certain universal semantic concept found in any natural language. Knowledge of collocation and its semantic content is important for natural language processing, as collocation comprises the restrictions on how words can be used together. We experimented with word2vec embeddings and six supervised machine learning methods most commonly used in a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Our objective was to study the ability of word2vec embeddings to represent the context of collocations in a way that could discriminate among lexical functions. A difference from previous work with word embeddings is that we trained word2vec on a lemmatized corpus after stopwords elimination, supposing that such vectors would capture a more accurate semantic characterization. The experiments were performed on a collection of 1,131 Excelsior newspaper issues. As the experimental results showed, word2vec representation of collocations outperformed the classical bag-of-words context representation implemented in a vector space model and fed into the same supervised learning methods.

L'adjectif en français et sa définition lexicographique par Paolo Frassi

Reviewed by: L'adjectif en français et sa définition lexicographique par Paolo Frassi Michael D. Picone Frassi, Paolo. L'adjectif en français et sa définition lexicographique. Peter Lang, 2018. ISBN 978-30-3433-394-8. Pp. 263. The specialized reader adhering to the Théorie Sens-Texte (Meaning-Text Theory) school of linguistics, most closely associated with Igor Mel' uk since its founding in the early 1960s, will find much satisfaction in Frassi's lexicographic reexamination of the French adjective, using it as a kind of TST proving ground, resulting in a normalized and simplified presentation of the adjectival part of speech when reconceptualized in conformity with the TST framework. The challenge that Frassi has taken on as a test case is at hand because the definitional constraining of the adjective is less straightforward than that of the noun or the verb, owing to the fact that the adjective does not lend itself transparently to the Aristotelian model of organizing the observable and experiential parts of our world into discrete entities in a kind of hierarchy. Applying the model of genre prochain (closest genus) and différences spécifiques, the lexicographer arrives at a ready definition of the noun renard by positing the hyperonyme (the lexicographic equivalent of the genre prochain), in this instance mammifère carnivore (canidé), and then adding a sufficient number of différences spécifiques, in this instance aux oreilles droites, à la tête triangulaire assez effilée, à la queue touffue, au pelage fourni, in order to constrain the targeted entity and contrast it (in the Saussurean sense) visà-vis all other comparable entities. As Frassi explains, however, modern lexicographers have abandoned this definitional structure when it comes to the adjective, in recognition [End Page 282] of the fact that it is a part of speech that functions differently than the noun. To exemplify, it would constitute a misconstrual to begin the definition for froid with the noun température as a hypernym. Although it can be substantivized, froid is fundamentally a part of speech functioning as a modifier and its primary definition must reflect this and give implicit recognition to the presence of the modified nom recteur (head noun). However, the nom recteur could be virtually anything and, consequently, must be left vacant in the ensuing definitional paraphrase: Qui est à une température sensiblement plus basse que celle du corps humain. For Frassi, such paraphrasing lacks formal rigor. Regardless of the category—adjectifs qualificatifs (froid), adjectifs de relation (présidentiel), adjectifs verbaux et déverbaux (effrayant, endormi)—by resorting to TST categories, he mirrors the hierarchical arrangement of the genre prochain and différences spécifiques by recasting all adjectival definitions as being composed of a composante centrale and a composante périphérique. Returning to the example of froid: CC = [X] qui a une température; CP (de polarité) = inférieure à la moyenne. For the lay reader, some of Frassi's argumentation may seem laborious and, at times, repetitive, but it is fascinating at the outset to learn that something that we now take for granted—namely that nouns and adjectives constitute two different parts of speech—was conceived of quite differently by our predecessors, for reasons alluded to above, and that the adjective was not fully emancipated from the category of the noun until the mid-eighteenth century. Michael D. Picone University of Alabama Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

La phraséologie dans le discours du dopage: un langage coloré

The aim of this paper is to describe the phrasemes in doping discourse. The corpus created comes from a magazine specialized in sports, paying particular attention to specific headlines, found in these magazines, devoted to doping. These phrasemes appear in a high frequency rate mainly in the titles of magazine articles, mainly in the titles of magazine articles. The Speaker uses numerous linguistic mechanisms (the most important one being unfrozeness) to transgress the norms of the fixation of the phrases. The research is carried out within a Meaning Text Theory (MTT) theoretical framework. Two main families of phrasemes (= non-free phrases) are distinguished: lexical phrasemes and semantic-lexical phrasemes. Three major classes of phrasemes are presented: non- compositional idioms, compositional collocations and clichés.

A teoria Sentido-Texto e suas possibilidades de aplicação em dicionários de aprendizes do espanhol

Estudantes de línguas estrangeiras precisam de ferramentas linguísticas confiáveis que descrevam a língua em uso, por um lado, e que satisfaçam as suas necessidades, por outro lado. Dicionários de aprendizes são ferramentas compiladas para auxiliar esse perfil de usuário em tarefas de compreensão e de produção. As colocações formam parte do conjunto dos principais fenômenos atinentes à produção. Esse tipo de combinatória carece de uma melhor descrição em muitos dicionários de aprendizes, especialmente nos dicionários de aprendizes de espanhol (DAEs) devido ao seu tratamento insatisfatório. O objetivo deste artigo é explorar a possibilidade de aplicação da Teoria Sentido-Texto (TST) para descrever colocações em DAEs. Primeiramente, introduzimos os postulados gerais da TST. Em seguida, listamos e analisamos colocações incluídas em DAEs e dicionários monolíngues de espanhol, comparando-as com dados de corpus. Por fim, aplicamos a TST na descrição das colocações encontradas e propomos uma adaptação da notação da TST. Conclui-se que a TST oferece um método bastante útil para descrever colocações. A próxima etapa desta pesquisa é apresentar as informações linguísticas de maneira ainda mais amigável para o consulente dos DAEs.

Vers un dictionnaire bilingue d’adjectifs qualificatifs du FLE

TOWARDS A BILINGUAL DICTIONARY OF QUALIFICATIVE ADJECTIVES FOR TEACHING FRENCH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE The paper aims to think about developing a dictionary of the usual adjectives of French. This support tool for expression in French as a foreign language will focus on the semantic, syntactic, actantial and combinatorial information which usually causes the most problems in the use of adjectives. All this information will be provided in a systematic way by using some concepts of Meaning-Text Theory: lexical function, semantic derivation, semantic actant and syntactic actant, plan scheme, and so on.

Causatividad y construcciones con verbo soporte en latín: el ejemplo de "poena afficere"

En este trabajo nos proponemos analizar la colocación latina poena afficere, ‘imponer un castigo’, un tipo de colocación con especificidades tanto sintácticas como semánticas que la distinguen de las construcciones verbo-nominales más prototípicas: el sustantivo predicativo funciona no como Objeto Directo sino como tercer argumento del verbo soporte, un esquema sintáctico que, como intentaremos demostrar, resulta ideal para la expresión de predicados causativos. De los ejemplos documentados de poena afficere en un amplio corpus de textos, intentaremos destacar las principales características de este tipo de colocación. Para su descripción y formalización nos serviremos del marco teórico propuesto por la Teoría Sentido-Texto.

Split and unified functions in the formation of old English nouns and adjectives

This journal article draws a distinction between the split and unified functions obtaining in the formation of Old English nouns and adjectives. The starting point of the discussion is an enlarged inventory of lexical functions that draw on Meaning-Text Theory and structural-functional grammars and explain the change of meaning caused by prefixation and suffixation in Old English. The extended inventory of lexical functions consists of 33 functions and has been applied to ca. 7,500 affixed nouns and adjectives extracted from the lexical database Nerthus (www.nerthusproject.com). The distinction between split and unified functions, in such a way that the former can be realized by both prefixes and suffixes and the latter by either prefixation or suffixation, allows for some generalizations. Firstly, the analysis proves that there are more functions involved in prefixation than in suffixation. Secondly, prefixation is meaning oriented while suffixation is class oriented.

‘Degrad verbs’ in Spanish and English

The Lexical Function Degrad is a device used in Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) to select the appropriate verb for expressing ‘to become permanently worse or bad’ in combination with different nouns. For example, in English one says that fruit rots, milk goes off, shoes wear out, flowers wilt, and iron rusts; thus, the verbs rot, go off, wear out, etc. can all be considered “values” of Degrad. Comparing these verbs with their translation equivalents in Spanish shows that verbs in the two languages have somewhat different collocational possibilities. Are such collocational differences arbitrary or do they result from subtle meaning differences between the translation equivalents? In this study we undertake a contrastive semantic analysis of a selection of words in the Degrad domain, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method of semantic explication. We conclude that collocational preferences are indeed semantically motivated, but at the same time we recognize that Degrad is a valuable lexicological tool for verb classification, as well as for coordinating translation equivalents across languages at an approximate level. The paper aims to encourage productive engagement between two well developed approaches to lexical semantics, while at the same time demonstrating the explanatory power of the detailed “micro semantic” analysis enabled by the NSM methodology.

Description lexicographique du vocable breton KEUZ ‘regret’

The paper proposes a lexicographic description of the polysemous word keuz ‘≈ regret’, from the Vannetais dialect of Breton. Our description is based both on written and oral usage, the latter being mostly that of the Pontivy region, in the North of the Department of Morbihan. Some of the wordsenses, not represented in the existing dictionaries of Breton, are described here for the first time. The theoretical frame of reference adopted is the Explanatory-Combinatorial Lexicology (ECL) of the Meaning-Text theory, a cutting-edge lexicological theory applied here for the very first time to a description of Breton data. An ECL-style lexicographic description, which, on the one hand, strives to make available to speakers all linguistic means necessary for an idomatic use of lexical units and, on the other hand, obeys formal descriptive principles, is not readily accessible to a non-initiated user. Therefore, the first part of the paper is dedicated to an explanation of the notions necessary for the comprehension of the lexicographic description proper.

Lexical Co-occurrence and Lexical Inheritance. Emotion Lexemes in German: A Lexicographic Case Study

In the present paper, we tackle the problem of the compact and efficient representation of restricted lexical co-occurrence information in the lexicon along semantic lines. The theoretical framework for this study is the <i>Meaning Text Theory</i> (MTT) and, more specifically, the lexicographic part of MIT --- the <i>Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary</i> (ECD), which contains for each lexeme (i) its semantic definition, (ii) a systematic description of its restricted lexical co-occurrence in terms of <i>Lexical Functions</i> (LF), and (iii) its <i>Government Pattern</i>. The data domain is the semantic field of emotion lexemes in German. In order to represent the restricted lexical co-occurrence (or collocations) of the lexemes in this field, we suggest the following procedure: 1. Construct approximate descriptions of their meaning, i.e. what we call the <i>abridged lexicographic definitions</i>. Formulated in terms of semantic features, these definitions are supposed to provide as much semantic information as necessary for establishing correlations between the semantic features of a lexeme and its collocates. 2. Specify their syntactic Government Patterns, which are needed for a clearer picture of their co-occurrence --- syntactic as well as lexical. 3. Specify their restricted lexical co-occurrence with the verbs chosen. 4. Establish correlations between the values of LFs and the semantic features in the abridged definitions of the emotion lexemes. 5. Based on these correlations, extract recurrent values of LFs (and recurrent Government Patterns) from individual lexical entries and list them under what we call the <b>generic</b> lexeme of the semantic field under study --- in this case, <b>GEFÜHL</b> 'emotion'. This leads on the one hand, to "compressed" lexical entries for emotion lexemes, and on the other hand, to the creation of a lexical entry of a new type: the "public" entry of a generic lexeme. <b>Keywords:</b> lexicography, lexicon, german emotion lexemes, lexical co-occurrence, collocations, meaning text theory, lexical functions, semantic features, semantico-lexical correlations, information extraction, inheritance, individual lexical subentry, public lexical subentry

Extracción automática de los patrones de rección de verbos de los diccionarios explicativos

In this work we propose the application of symbolic methods for extraction of semantic valences of the verbs describing them under the Government Pattern concept of the MeaningText Theory. The method is based on the automatic processing of the definitions of verbs used in Explanatory Dictionaries and the analysis of semantic relationships, as inclusion and synonymy, given among them. We believe that lexicographic definitions of Explanatory Dictionaries supply enough information for identifying verb actants. The obtained results show that even when it is not possible to find information related to the argument structure of verbs in the definitions, it is possible to deduce it identifying and analyzing other definitions which semantic relationships are established.

Treebank Annotation in the Light of the Meaning-Text Theory

A treebank may contain the annotation of different phenomena such as word order, morphological features, syntactic and semantic relations, etc., which are rather different in their nature. Quite often, the annotation of these phenomena is combined in a single structure, which leads to low-quality training results and is verifiably deficient from a theoretical (linguistic) perspective. We argue that the annotation of corpora requires a well-defined linguistic model which supports multi-level annotation, with one type of phenomenon per level. Our experience with dependency treebanks created or adjusted for surface-oriented natural language generation and based on the Meaning-Text Theory, a multi-level linguistic model, supports this argumentation.

Alternances actancielles et la montée du possesseur : une étude de cas en espagnol

The present paper is an exercise in the description of actant structures in Spanish possessor raising constructions in the framework of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT). We argue that there is a significant difference between constructions in which the possessor is incorporated into the meaning of the main verb and constructions in which it is not. This difference explains the availability or lack of certain alternations for specific constructions ; it also leads to different semantic and syntactic actant structures of the main verb. We show that the multilevel linguistic model of the MTT allows for a distinct representation of each type of construction, and that the concepts of Government Pattern and transduction underlying MTT facilitate an adequate representation of the projection of the structures of possessor raising constructions between the different levels of the MTT model. A particular role in these projections is assigned to another central feature of the MTT : the semantic communicative structure.

Morphological mismatches in machine translation

This paper addresses one of the least studied, although very important, problems of machine translation--the problem of morphological mismatches between languages and their handling during transfer. The level at which we assume transfer to be carried out is the Deep-Syntactic Structure (DSyntS) as proposed in the Meaning-Text Theory. DSyntS is abstract enough to avoid all types of surface morphological divergences. For the remaining `genuine' divergences between grammatical significations, we propose a morphological transfer model. To illustrate this model, we apply it to the transfer of grammemes of definiteness and aspect for the language pair Russian---German and German---Russian, respectively.

Syntactic mismatches in machine translation

This paper addresses one of the central problems arising at the transfer stage in machine translation: syntactic mismatches, that is, mismatches between a source-language sentence structure and its equivalent target-language sentence structure. The level at which we assume the transfer to be carried out is the Deep-Syntactic Structure (DSyntS) as proposed in the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT). DSyntS is abstract enough to avoid all types of divergences that result either from restricted lexical co-occurrence or from surface-syntactic discrepancies between languages. As for the remaining types of syntactic divergences, all of them occur not only interlinguistically, but also intralinguistically; this means that establishing correspondences between semantically equivalent expressions of the source and target languages that diverge with respect to their syntactic structure is nothing else than paraphrasing. This allows us to adapt the powerful intralinguistic paraphrasing mechanism developed in MTT for purposes of interlinguistic transfer.