Meaning-text Theory for Cross-linguistic Comparisons: A Study on Typological Investigations

Abstract

This study explores the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT henceforth) and its application in cross-linguistic comparisons for typological investigations. MTT models the correspondence between meanings and their textual expressions, adopting a stratificational approach with semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological representation levels. A qualitative approach analyzes and compares the semantic, syntactic, and morphological structures across typologically diverse languages using the formal representations of MTT, including semantic networks, syntactic trees, lexical functions, and paraphrasing rules. MTT effectively facilitates cross-linguistic comparisons and typological investigations by capturing language-specific patterns and highlighting similarities and differences across languages at various linguistic representation levels. The findings contribute to understanding language typology and variation. MTT provides a principled approach to modeling and analyzing linguistic data across diverse languages, applicable in areas like natural language processing, machine translation, language learning, and documentation.