A Short Guide to the Meaning-text Linguistic Theory

The paper presents the Meaning-Text linguistic theory, a theoretical framework for the construction of models of natural languages, called Meaning-Text Models. Since its beginnings, in the 1960’s, the Meaning-Text theory has placed strong emphasis on semantics and considered natural language primarily as a tool for expressing meaning. This basic insight underlies its interest in linguistic synthesis (rather than analysis), paraphrase (synonymy of linguistic expressions, in particular of full sentences) and the lexicon. The Meaning-Text theory has always considered relations (rather than classes) to be the main organizing factor in language and has made an extensive use of the concept of linguistic dependency, in particular of syntactic dependency (vs. constituency). Thus, it has in many ways anticipated current developments in linguistics. Due to a formal character of the Meaning-Text theory and the corresponding models, the latter have been successfully applied in Natural Language Processing, in particular automatic text generation and machine translation. The paper is organized in five sections: 1. Natural language viewed as a Meaning-Text correspondence (postulates of the theory); 2. Meaning-Text Models of natural languages (characteristics of the models: levels of linguistic representation and rules which establish correspondences between them); 3. Illustration of the linguistic synthesis in the Meaning-Text framework; 4. Summary of the main features of the Meaning-Text theory; 5. Basic Meaning-Text bibliography.