Semantics

PARADIGMATIC RELATIONS II 147
analysis, and later on in lesson 5.
There is one important difference between the above mentioned
theories and NSM. In this model the meaning of a word does not depend
on the meaning of other related words. It consists of a configuration of
semantic primitives for each word. The specification of lexical relatednes
within the NSM is based on definitional analysis. Each word is defined
in terms of its most basic components and at the same time the word is
compared with the meanings of other intuitively related words. Wierzbicka
claims that non-arbitrary semantic fields can be established by comparing
configurations of semantic primitives in the definitions of words. The
definitions through which she postulates semantic field relatedness take
the form of a shared prototypical scenario describing a highly abstract
cognitive structure. When analyzing English speech verbs she observes
that verbs that share semantic components also share certain syntactic
frames or combination of frames. She also says that syntactic differences,
which at first seem idiosyncratic, are often a sign of very real semantic
differences and thus confirm the reliability of syntactic clues in semantic
analysis.
As was previously said, Mel’čuk Meaning Text Theory is another
possibility of organizing the lexicon. Its main interest lies in the
consideration of the text as a starting point for analysis.
Mel’čuk’s theory MTT (Meaning Text linguistic Theory), has been
formalized in his MTM (Meaning Text Model) which is a system of rules
that simulates the linguistic behavior of humans. This model tries to
perform the transition from what is loosely called meanings (any
information or content that the speaker wants to transmit in his / her
language) and texts (any physical manifestation of speech) and vice
versa.
The central component of MTM, where the biggest part of data is
stored, is a formalized semantically oriented lexicon called Explanatory
Combinatorial Dictionary (= ECD) which is paraphrase based.
6.2. GRAMMATICAL MEANING
Cruse explains how, traditionally, syntactic categories are defined
semantically by saying, for example, that nouns are words referring to
persons, places, or things, verbs are ‘doing words’, adjectives ‘describing
words’, etc. However, since these definitions leaked, other approaches
were attempted. Cruse suggests prototypical classification criteria where
grammatical categories are like natural categories such as BIRD or FRUIT,