[Corpora-List] Man bites dog

[Mike Maxwell]

On 11/20/2011 10:22 PM, Mark Lybrand wrote:
> My french is rusty, but spanish would have a disambuation by prefixing
> the accustive with a preposition:
> Hombre muerde a perro.

I may not remember what I actually said (and possibly I didn't even use 
another language); and this is a little beside the point.  But--I'm not 
sure the Spanish would necessarily use the 'a' for an animal.  The 
examples that are usually given where the 'a' marker is needed are 
almost always with humans, not animals.  Aissen ("Differential object 
marking: Iconicity vs. economy", fn 24) writes:
     In Spanish, object marking is optional for animate
     (non-human) definites and for human indefinites.
At any rate, this is supposed to be headline language, so articles are 
omitted, and it seems plausible that 'a' could be omitted too.  But I 
don't want to get too deeply into these questions, as my real question 
was about statistical MT.
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu
	"My definition of an interesting universe is
	one that has the capacity to study itself."
         --Stephen Eastmond

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