LINGUIST List 14.2054

Thu Jul 31 2003

Books: Semantics: Fillmore

Editor for this issue: Marisa Ferrara <marisalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. sosa, Form and Meaning in Language: Fillmore

	
Title: Form and Meaning in Language
Subtitle: Volume 1: Papers on Semantic Roles
Series Title: CSLI Lecture Notes, #121
			
Publication Year: 2003
Publisher: CSLI Publications 
 http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/		 
			
Author: Charles J. Fillmore, University of California, Berkeley and
 the International Computer Science Inst.

Hardback: ISBN: 1575862859, Pages: 319, Price: $70.00
Paperback: ISBN: 1575862867, Pages: 319, Price: $25.00
			
Abstract:

The early articles in this collection represent the emergence, out of
the generative grammar tradition, of an approach to the description of
language - Case Grammar so called - that refused to honor the official
distinction between structures of sentence form and structures of
sentence meaning. Certain aspects of the organization of a simple
sentence in any language, it was claimed, could be formulated in terms
of a constrained set of role names indicating the props and players in
schemas of states, state changes, action, motion, and
experience. 

Although it was intended as a contribution to the theory of deep
structure and the layering of grammatical transformations, case
grammar ended by forming an independent stream of intellectual
activity, affecting linguistics, psychology, and artificial
intelligence. Within linguistics it contained proposals for the
connection between schemas of action and experience of the kind
encoded especially in verbs, included proposals for displaying various
kinds of language universals, characterizing typological differences
between languages, and displaying "deep" relations between
superficially different grammatical constructions; as such it and its
numerous variations served as the framework for a large number of
language descriptions. Within psychology it offered ways of
formulating a new order of questions about language understanding and
the evolution of linguistic competence in children. Within computer
science it provided one of the ideas behind object-oriented
programming; in artificial intelligence and natural language
processing it formed part of the basis for various network
representations of text meanings and it became a part of proposals for
an interlingua representing the semantic commonalities behind
translation equivalents in machine translation projects. The later
articles move beyond the semantic roles of sentence constituents
toward other kinds of information needed in semantic description,
including information about the organization of vocabulary, the
relations between language use and the context of use, moving toward
more flexible ways of describing the conceptual structures behind
lexical and sentential meanings.

Lingfield(s): Semantics
			 
Written In: English (Language Code: ENG)


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