The Semantic Representation of Natural Language

by Michael Levison

Could a single semantic formalism be created which would allow for the representation of meaning at all levels from basic semantic units and relations to sentence-level and text-level meaning, while remaining practical and user-friendly? This book showcases a detailed, precise and clear semantic formalism such that representations of meaning can be created and understood by a wide range of users, including logicians, linguists, creative writers, and literary specialists without detailed technical knowledge.In this monograph, the authors propose the formalism, showing its basic structure, applying it to the analysis of the semantics of a wide variety of linguistic phenomena in both English and French, and using it to generate the semantics of a variety of texts ranging from single sentences, to textual excepts, to a full story. By drawing on fundamental principles of program design, the proposed formalism is both easy to read and modify yet sufficiently powerful to allow for the representation of complex semantic phenomena.

352 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012