"Semantic basis of parsing" (Nguyen Van Hiep)

Associate Professor Dr. Nguyen Van Hiep is currently a lecturer at the Faculty of Linguistics (University of Social Sciences and Humanities - VNU). This book is the result of specialized lectures on semantics and grammar that he has presented at the graduate and doctoral levels over the past ten years. On the occasion of the publication of the new work (Education Publishing House, May 2008), we would like to introducePrefaceof the book.

Excerpt from the preface to "The Semantic Foundations of Syntactic Analysis"

As the title suggests, this book aims to explore and establish the semantic foundations for parsing.

From being looked down upon and unreliable in formal grammar trends, nowadays, with the strong development of functional grammar and cognitive grammar, meaning is a particularly emphasized factor. In grammar research, it is necessary to talk about meaning, to discuss semantic grammar.

However, meaning is a very abstract and elusive object. It is not easy to answer the question: “What kinds of meanings can be conveyed by a sentence?”

Based on the assumption that whatever is expressed in a sentence has a meaning, this book attempts to analyze the layers of meaning that can be conveyed in a sentence. The remarkable development of semantics in recent times has given us a reliable basis for discussing those layers of meaning. With the notion that syntax is not autonomous, but that syntax is for conveying meaning, we believe that separating the layers of meaning that a sentence expresses will simultaneously establish a semantic basis for parsing. Those layers of meaning, in our opinion, include descriptive meaning, modal meaning, thematic meaning, and utterance purpose meaning.

From establishing the above semantic foundations, we propose a new approach to describing the syntactic structure of Vietnamese sentences.

Our approach is to start from the types of meaning that can be expressed in a sentence and to define the corresponding formal categories. This is a radical function-to-form approach, which was succinctly expressed by the Belgian linguist Jan Nuyts as: "taking the semantic category as its starting point, it looks into the range of its liguistic manifestation" [Nuyts 2001].

This approach is still quite new to Vietnamese grammar researchers. However, in our opinion, this is an approach that promises many positive results, because we have had too much experience with endless debates over the past decades in trying to use formal criteria to determine the syntactic components of Vietnamese sentences, an isolating language that does not change morphology. Starting from the types of meaning that can be expressed in a sentence, considering them as the semantic bases for describing the syntactic structure of a Vietnamese sentence, we advocate a simple way of analyzing sentences, based on our cognitive experiences about the world and the way of organizing and presenting those experiences. This approach leads us to the conclusion that a sentence is a multidimensional entity, the linear structural components of a sentence are not homogeneous in their function of reflecting information belonging to those different dimensions. And as a consequence, if we abandon the unilinear view for a "cubistic" view of the sentence, we must arrive at a modular analysis of its structural elements.

This book is aimed at students, graduate students and researchers majoring in linguistics in particular and literature in general. It is also necessary for those who do research and teach literature, because studying a literary work is studying the message that the work conveys to the reader, and the smallest unit that can convey that information is the sentence. From a certain perspective, mastering the semantic content of the sentence will be the basis for discovering the message of the larger text as a whole. We hope that the book will provide reliable and updated semantic knowledge, helping to handle the difficult problems in analyzing and describing the syntactic structure of Vietnamese sentences.

In this book, when citing, in most cases, we note three parameters: author's name, year of publication and page number. All information related to the cited work will be presented specifically in the "References" section, arranged in order by author's last name. Sections will be numbered according to the chapter number, along with subsection distinctions, for example, if you encounter section 5.3.2, you will know that this section is in Chapter 5, the second subsection (ie after 5.3.1) in the large section 5.2.

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