Towards the Meaning-Text Model and its Function of Lexical Definition
Zhang Yi-hu · Xiandai wai-yu · 2002
Meaning-Text model (MST in French), proposed by Mel'cuk and Zholkovskij in the 60s of last century, is based on the principle that language consists in mapping from the content or meaning of utterance to its form or text.The model is composed of some structural modules based on various levels of lexical representations, which are multi-faceted except the semantic level. These two aspects are demonstrated as its surface representations of phonology, morphology and syntax. The correspondence between adjacent levels is assured through a set of rules or components and the lexical meaning is revealed in the process of the mapping of representations at all levels, especially by way of semantic structure, sentence structure, and written or spoken forms of lexical units.One of the most important achievement of MST is the development of a formal lexicon based on the principle of Meaning-Text Theory Dictionnaire Explicatifet Combinatoire du Francais Contemporain (DEC), in which a formal description of French is given. In recent years MST attracts more and more attention from people in academic circles and has been successfully applied to Dependency Grammar, artificial intelligence and machine translation. Besides, linguists have introduced this theory into the compilation of bilingual explanatory and combinatorial dictionary. It is reported that lexicographers and linguists in Spain, Russia, Japan and South Korean have made initial achievements in making bilingual dictionaries with the mother tongue as the target language. The present paper is intended to discuss MST and its application in lexical definition.