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A NEW ANALYSIS FOR MACHINE TRANSLATION OF THE AUXILIARY AND MAIN VERB COMPLEX
Author(s) -
Sigurd Bengt
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9582.1992.tb00826.x
Subject(s) - verb , reflexive verb , linguistics , computer science , verb phrase ellipsis , modal verb , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , phrase , predicative expression , philosophy
. The analysis of the verb phrase poses interesting problems. This paper suggests a binary solution where the auxiliary is treated as one constituent and the main verb complex as another. Auxiliaries are thus not treated as main verbs as was suggested by Ross 1967 (and followed in the first version of Referent Grammar, Sigurd 1987). The auxiliary may be lacking (latent, empty), in which case the main verb carries the tense (finite) marker, or the auxiliary may be present, in which case the auxiliary carries the tense marker, while the main verb complex must be nonfinite. In the main verb complex, the main verb may be preceded by almost any number of nonfinite auxiliaries, and it is this possibility which creates theoretically interesting chains of nonfinite verb forms such as Swedish Eva måste ha velat kunna våga (att) hoppa (Eva must have wanted to be able to dare (to) jump). A basic idea of this paper is that the nonfinite auxiliary verb forms can be added as prefixes (or as in G man suffixes) by a kind of morphological rule.