“Znannieva Semantyka,” a translation of Yuriy Tarnawsky’s 1982 New York University Ph.D. dissertation, “Knowledge Semantics/A Knowledge-Based Semantic Theory,” is the first work in Ukrainian language on the subject of transformational-generative grammar, an approach to the study of language which has dominated the field of linguistics for over half a century, since its introduction in 1957 by the American linguist Prof. Noam Chomsky of MIT.
Sponsored by the U.S. branch of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, the Ukrainian-language version was created by a group of translators in conjunction with Dr. Tarnawsky, who developed the technical vocabulary and authorized the sections which were not done by him.
The project was initiated and coordinated by Prof. Orysia Demska of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The original text, which has been updated by Dr. Tarnawsky, is augmented by prefaces by Prof. Demska and Prof. Ray Dougherty, one of the earliest students of Chomsky and the original dissertation advisor, by an author’s foreword, as well as by an English-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-English dictionary of technical terms and expressions numbering some 2,500 entries compiled by Dr. Tarnawsky
“Knowledge Semantics” describes the semantic component within Chomsky’s Revised Extended Standard Theory, which is radically different from those proposed at the time the dissertation was written, all of which required a level on which the meaning of the sentence had to be defined in terms of the so-called semantic primitives, which purportedly constituted the interpretation of the sentence. Dr. Tarnawsky’s work argues that such a level does not constitute an interpretation but a mere paraphrase which still remains to be interpreted. Under his theory, any interpretation should be carried out in terms of a knowledge base representing the knowledge of the hearer, and may be achieved by mapping the input sentence, translated from its syntactic representation into one in higher-order predicate logic, onto the knowledge base represented in the same notation, in which each entry points to the entries it implies. The interpretation, then, is the sum of all the pointers generated by the words in the sentence. The theory appears to be as valid today as it was when the dissertation was written.
In his preface to the book, Prof. Dougherty notes: “Dr. Tarnawsky’s dissertation, with its strong emphasis on the ‘social and contextual usage’ of sentences falls squarely into the camp of [Harvard philosopher Hilary] Putnam, who was rarely discussed by Chomsky MIT linguists. Dr. Tarnawsky’s dissertation ran counter to 99 percent of semantic research in the Chomsky MIT School of linguistics. It was revolutionary in offering a novel perspective and a detailed computational theory that merged Chomsky’s and Putnam’s views. […It] might well have been the first work to integrate Putnam’s and Chomsky’s views into one formulation.”