The present volume contains articles of well-known representatives of Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and other related linguistic theories. The focus of the volume is on semantics, semantic representation and relation of semantics to surface in MTT. Founded by I. Mel'cuk and A. Zholkovsky in the sixties in Moscow, MTT soon became known in the West as a "prominent outsider" theory. The picture has changed since then, though, as MTT gained importance in several areas of linguistics and computational linguistics. It has influenced the design of new grammar formalisms such as Dependency Tree Grammars. Also, specific parts of MTT have been directly taken into other theories; as, for example, the work on integrating Lexical Functions into Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon.