Introduction

The introduction explains the architecture of the book and sketches the Meaning-Text linguistic model, underlying the subsequent discussion.

I. Surface-syntactic relations in the languages of the world

with special studies of subjects and objects.

II. Grammatical voice in the dependency framework

the “passive” construction in Chinese.

III. The relative clause

a calculus and analysis of possible types; the pseudo-relative (“headless”) clause.

IV. Binary conjunctions

such as IF …, THEN …, free indefinite pronouns ([He went] nobody knows where), and syntactic idioms.

V. Word order

linearization of dependency structures.

The monograph offers a new perspective in syntactic studies. It is strongly typology-oriented (using the data from typologically diverse languages: English, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Basque, Georgian, etc.) and based on a system of rigorous definitions of the notions involved, which ensures a link with computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing.