1 International MTT Conferences
2 Introduction
3 Other facts on MTT
4 People in and around MTT
5 MTT groups
6 Bibliography
7 Resources
8 The world of dependency
9 This wiki

International MTT Conferences

Since 2003, MTT conferences are held biannually.

The next MTT conference will be held In Barcelona: MTT 2011

MTT 2003 in Paris
MTT 2005 in Moscow
MTT 2007 in Klagenfurt
MTT 2009 in Montréal

Introduction

The Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) is a linguistics framework based on the idea that language is a means to express meaning by texts. MTT, which grew out of work on machine translation in the USSR 40 years ago, is characterized by:

1. the Modeling of language as a correspondence between meaning and texts/sounds; 2. the central position of the lexicon; 3. the privileged position of semantics over syntax; 4. and the use of a dependency representation in syntax.

The language is presented as a multi-stage mechanism in which each module ensures the correspondence between two adjacent levels of utterance representation. A linguistic module is a set of formal rules whose input is a representation closer to meaning and the output a representation closer to text.

The complete set of these rules establishes the correspondence between a semantic representation (the representation of a meaning) and a the phonetic representation (the representation of the corresponding speech sounds called text

The classical Meaning-Text Theory assumes the following representations:

Semantic representation
Deep syntactic representation
Surface syntactic representation
Deep morphological representation
Surface morphological representation
Deep phonological representation
Surface phonological representation (currently refered to as phonetic representation)

Each representation consists of several structures. One important structure on the semantic and both syntactic levels is the communicative structure known also as "information structure".

Other facts on MTT

MTT is part of the larger group of approaches to linguistics that give an important place to the dependency tree in its syntactic representation. Other important terms include: actant, actant slot, diathesis, voice, paraphrase

Large efforts of research in MTT go into lexicography. One result is the [www.olst.umontreal.ca/deceng.html|Explanatory and Combinatorial Dictionary of Contemporary French]]. MTT dictionaries make wide use of lexical functions. Other important terms include: lexeme, semanteme, government pattern ("régime")