The Festschrift volume consists of 42 contributions by 55 authors from 13 countries. The papers, written in Catalan, English, French, Russian and Spanish, treat data from these and some other languages (Arabic, BCS [Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian], Czech, Finnish, Hebrew, Korean, Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan [Alaska], Shughni [Pamir]). They pertain to virtually all branches of "core" synchronic linguistics (with occasional excursions into diachrony, literary theory, philology and religious studies): semantics, lexicology / lexicography, syntax and morphology. Some are more theoretically minded while others are focused on pedagogical and / or computational applications of language models, particularly those of the Meaning-Text theory. The topics covered are collocations and other types of phrasemes, lexical functions, syntactic dependencies, argument structure and grammatical voice, to mention just a few.

This book is an advanced introduction to semantics that presents this crucial component of human language through the lens of the 'Meaning-Text' theory - an approach that treats linguistic knowledge as a huge inventory of correspondences between thought and speech. Formally, semantics is viewed as an organized set of rules that connect a representation of meaning (Semantic Representation) to a representation of the sentence (Deep-Syntactic Representation). The approach is particularly interesting for computer assisted language learning, natural language processing and computational lexicography, as our linguistic rules easily lend themselves to formalization and computer applications. The model combines abstract theoretical constructions with numerous linguistic descriptions, as well as multiple practice exercises that provide a solid hands-on approach to learning how to describe natural language semantics.