Book

Universal Semantic Syntax: A Semiotactic Approach

This book offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to a novel theory of syntax, which analyzes grammar from a semantic perspective.

Author

Egbert Fortuin, Hetty Geerdink-Verkoren

Date

23 May 2019

Links

Cambridge University Press

Syntactic theory has been dominated in the last decades by theories that disregard semantics in their approach to syntax. Presenting a truly semantic approach to syntax, this book takes as its primary starting point the idea that syntax deals with the relations between meanings expressed by form-meaning elements and that the same types of relations can be found cross-linguistically. The theory provides a way to formalize the syntactic relations between meanings so that each fragment of grammar can be analyzed in a clear-cut way. A comprehensive introduction into the theoretical concepts of the theory is provided, with analyzes of numerous examples in English and various other languages, European and non-European, to illustrate the concepts. The theory discussed will enable linguists to look for similarities between languages, while at the same time acknowledging important language specific features.