Proposes robust onomasiological semantic formalism and applies it to a wide variety of linguistic phenomena.

This volume contains a detailed, precise and clear semantic formalism designed to allow non-programmers such as linguists and literary specialists to represent elements of meaning which they must deal with in their research and teaching. At the same time, by its basis in a functional programming paradigm, it retains sufficient formal precision to support computational implementation. The formalism is designed to represent meaning as found at a variety of levels, including basic semantic units and relations, word meaning, sentence-level phenomena, and text-level meaning. 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. In this monograph, the authors introduce the formalism and show its basic structure, apply it to the analysis of the semantics of a variety of linguistic phenomena in both English and French, and use it to represent the semantics of a variety of texts ranging from single sentences, to textual excepts, to a full story.

"Levison et al. present a useful meaning representation framework ... superior in both human-readability (especially by non-specialists) and in its representation of discourse structures beyond the sentence-level. These are important features and ... contribute to the greater usefulness of this framework for non-computational linguists." - Studies in Language

"[This book] provides a practical formal representation of the meaning of expressions of natural language, from basic semantic units to texts, which, commendably, relies closely on recent results within various contemporary theories and applications within lexical semantics, such as componential analysis, conceptual structures ... as well as various truth-conditional approaches to sentence meaning." - The Year's Work in English Studies