Livre: 1 announcement

[Philippe Blache]

From: salkoff at cora-sa.com (Morris Salkoff)


Book Announcement

New book: A French-English grammar: a contrastive grammar on translational
principles.   Morris Salkoff, 1999  J. Benjamins: Amsterdam/Philadelphia

		In this contrastive French-English grammar, the comparisons between French
structures and their English equivalents are formulated as rules which
associate a French schema (of a particular grammatical structure) with its
translation into an equivalent English schema. The grammar contains all the
rules giving the English equivalents under translation of the principal
grammatical structures of French: the verb phrase, the noun phrase and the
adjuncts (modifiers).

		In addition to its intrinsic linguistic interest, this comparative grammar
has two important applications. The translation equivalences it contains can
provide a firm foundation for the teaching of the techniques of translation.
Furthermore, such a comparative grammar is a necessary preliminary to any
program of machine translation, which needs a set of formal rules, like
those given here for the French-to-English case, for translating into a
target language the syntactic structures encountered in the source language.

		The importance of this comparative grammar is seen from the new results
obtained here, which can have an immediate application to research in MT.
These are the translational sub-classes and the passe-partout (all-purpose)
translations. The first are sub-classes of French words and their English
translations, which are related only as translation equivalents, but are not
otherwise distinguished in their respective grammars. The need for such
sub-classes emerges only when certain difficulties are encountered in
finding suitable English equivalents for French schemata. The second, the
passe-partout translations, are approximate translations which are useful in
two cases. In the first case, there are several related schemata whose
translations could be separated only on the basis of semantic considerations
that would be difficult to formalize. The passe-partout translation provides
a 'cover' translation that is approximately correct for all the schemata,
and does not require establishing hard-to-define semantic sub-classes. In
the second case, some one-to-many translations of a French word can be
approximated by a single passe-partout translation which covers
approximately the same range of meaning in English as the original
one-to-many translations do.

		Such results could not have been found from the sole consideration of
grammatical phenomena in French or English grammar independently of each
other. As the reader will observe from the data collected in this book, a
comparative study is necessary both for pedagogical purposes, and for
research in machine translation.

Table of Contents

Chapter  1  Introduction

	1.0 Generalities
	1.1 Previous Work
	1.2 The Present Method
	1.3 Comparative grammar for pedagogy and for MT

Chapter 2  Major sentence structures; the verb; the object

	2.1 Principal Clauses	
	2.2 The Verb	
	2.3 Modals                            	
	2.4 Support verbs	
	2.5 Objects	
	2.6 Negation
	2.7 Amalgamation
						
     Chapter 3  The Noun Phrase NP

	3.1 gN  N  dN
	3.2 Qd  de  NP
	3.3 Pronouns
	3.4 Noun Replacement strings

    Chapter 4   Adjuncts

    Chapter 5   Conclusions; Applications

      I. Conclusions

	5.1 New translations
	5.2 Solutions
	5.3 Translational Sub-classes
	5.4 Reversible Grammars
	5.5 An Extension of passe-partout translations
	5.6 Extension to other language pairs

      II. Applications

	5.7 To pedagogy
	5.8 To MT

References

	J. Benjamins,  Lingvisticae Investigationes Supplementa, 22
	    1999.  xvi, 342 pp.  HB: 150 Dutch guilder
					pb: 70 Dutch guilder