The monograph presents the Meaning-Text approach applied to the domain of syntax from a typological angle; it deals with several long-standing syntactic problems on the basis of a dependency description.

Its content can be presented in five parts + an Introduction:

The Introduction explains the architecture of the book and sketches the Meaning-Text linguis-tic 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