Anna Wierzbicka, Semantic Decomposition, and the Meaning-Text Approach

Abstract

The paper aims to demonstrate that the main contribution of Anna Wierzbicka to linguistics is the idea of semantic decomposition — that is, representing meaning in terms of structurally organized configurations of simpler meanings — and a huge amount of specific decompositions of lexical meanings from many languages. One of possible developments of this idea of Wierzbicka’s is the Meaning-Text linguistic approach, and in particular — the Meaning-Text model of natural language. To illustrate the importance and fruitfulness of semantic decomposition, two Meaning-Text mini-models are presented for English and Russian. Two semantically equivalent sentences of these languages are considered: (1) a. Eng. A honeymooner was fatally attacked by a shark. ~ b. Rus. Molodožën pogib v rezul´tate napadenija akuly vo vremja medovogo mesjaca lit. ‘Young.husband died as result of.attack of.shark during honey month’ The formal representations of these sentences at four levels—Meaning-Text style—are shown: semantic, deep-syntactic, surface-syntactic, and deep-morphological. Examples of formal rules relating the representations of two adjacent levels are presented.