Semiotactic Relations and Symbols

In the following sections the formalization and the relation symbols used in the notations will be explained and illustrated with examples to demonstrate how the semiotactic representations are compiled and how they could be interpreted. The goal of the semiotactic formalization is to provide a formula for each construction. A construction consists of a number of semantic particles related to each other by semiotactic relations that can be formalized by using symbols. In the formalizations we will mainly use English as a metalanguage to refer to the meanings (semantic particles) of the construction, but in some instances we will also use the ‘target language’ as the metalanguage (e.g. French, Dutch, German, Russian and Japanese). It should be noted that in most cases we do not provide definitions of the meanings or discuss whether the meanings are polysemous or not. Semantic particles (i.e. non-complex meanings) need not correlate only with words but may also correlate with (part of ) the meaning expressed by a morpheme. To give an example, the English plural form -s is part of a word but has its own contribution to the meaning, which must be semiotactically represented so that a distinction can be made between, for example, the dog and the dogs. Another example is the English semantic particle ‘un’, expressed by the morpheme unas in unkind, which does indeed contribute an added meaning to the word kind, i.e. a contrasting meaning. Of course, there are also many languages where a meaning that is expressed by a morpheme in English is expressed by a word, or vice versa. For the semiotactic representation it is irrelevant how a semantic particle is expressed (i.e. by a word or a morpheme), therefore this is not indicated in the formalization. At the same time, morphemes (or words) that do not contribute to meaning but have only a purely grammatical function are not semiotactically represented. An example is the English verb inflection -s, as in he walks,which does not indicate a difference in themeaning of ‘walk’ as compared with I walk, even though it only occurs in the case of a third person singular. For each element of an utterance the decision must be made as to whether and, if so, how it should be represented in the semiotactic notation. As the