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Support verb constructions: linguistic properties, representation, translation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2008

Laurence Danlos
Laurence Danlos
Affiliation:
UFR de Linguistique, Université de Paris 7, 2, Place Jussieu, 75251 Paris Cedex 05, France
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Abstract

This article deals with constructions such as Jean a fait une promenade or Jean a soif which contain verbs called here ‘support verbs’. These structures are known to pose immense difficulties for the translator (whether human or automatic) and part oif the purpose of this paper is to suggest representations which render their translation easier on the basis of work carried out by the author within the EC Eurotra Machine Translation project. First of all, it is argued on linguistic grounds that support verb constructions behave differently from constructions containing ‘ordinary’ verbs such as lire or ouvrir. In particular, it is claimed that the syntactic and semantic head of Jean a fait une promenade is the noun promenade and not the verb faire which is a mere carrier of tense and aspect. We then raise the question of the representation of support verb constructions for the purposes of machine translation and examine several alternative possibilities. The representations adopted below are shown to lead to simple transfer rules limited to the substitution of lexical items which do not entail complex structural changes between source and target sentences. The linguistic ideas presented here have been implemented in nine languages within the Eurotra project but most of the discussion is based on contrastive evidence between French and English.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , March 1992 , pp. 1 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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