اصول و روش ترجمه(Meaning based translation)

Chapter 3

The semantic structure of language

There is a distinction between deep (semantic) structure and the surface structure (grammatical, lexical, phonological) structure of language.Semantic structure is more nearly universal than grammatical structure. All languages have meaning components which can be classified as things, Events, Attributes or Relations for example. Semantic propositions occur in all languages. They consist of concepts related to one another with an Event, Thing, or Attribute as the central concept. For example in the sentence: “John hits the ball” John is agent, ball is affected and hits is activity. In semantic structure ordering is chornological. Classification and number of word classes depends on distribution.The smallest unit in the semantic structure is a meaning component. Meaning components group together to form concepts. Concepts classified into four principles, Things, Attributes, Events, Relations.Meaning components of “boy”: Human being, Male, Young. Relationship between semantic structure and grammar: thing: noun, pronoun; Event: verb; Attribute: adjective, adverb; Relation: conjunction, preposition, particle, enclitics . In “I heared John’s call” call is noun but semantically is Event. Without skewing between semantic and grammatical structure we have: meaning component … morpheme (roots and affixes)  Concept … word; complex concept (concept cluster) … phrase; proposition … clause; propositional cluster … sentence; semantic paragraph … paragraph; episode … section; episode cluster … division semantic part … part; discourse … text .One distinction between meaning and form is that speaker can exercise choice on meaning. But since form is mechanical component of meaning speaker has no choice on it.The meaning which is chosen will be influenced by the communication situation, like by who the speaker is, who the audience is, the tradition of the culture, age, gender, etc. Every sentence communicates information and emotions of the source language. Before form is chosen from the possibilities in the surface structure, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic matters must be