LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 24:12 December 2024
ISSN 1930-2940

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Exploring Syntactic Function Inversion in the Context of
Lexical Verb Transfer between English and Tamil

Dr. R. Saranya and Shakir Azeem C B., Ph.D. Research Scholar

Abstract

The staggering volume of translation into Indic languages in various fields as well as domains, especially from English, has given rise to acute and long-term demands to investigate the underlying linguistic-cognitive processes with a view to clarifying, facilitating and enhancing transfer mechanism for a desired quality output. This pertains to both MT/MAHT and human translation, not only because of the scale but also support-system tooling needs of the vast and pervasive ongoing translation activity.

Understanding the key role of verb as the central element in predicator has inevitable implications in mediation of meanings across languages smoothly and accurately. The propositional components embedded within clause elements that lead to informational content in a text largely revolve around predicator and the event. The need therefore to delineate the behavior of lexical verbs as the core of predicator becomes crucial.

Going beyond syntactic categorization of lexical verbs, this paper attempts to account for syntactic function inversion – subject-object or subject-complement inversion – of lexical verbs between English and Tamil in terms of event structures, syntactic and semantic classification of verbs, diathesis alternation, argument realization and theta roles. In this, it draws upon some of the best-known works and developments in these areas including Levin (1993; 2005), Jackendoff (1996), Rappaport Hovav and Levin (1998), Perek (2015), Li (2015) and Truswell (2019).

The equivalents of English verbs ‘have’ and ‘like’ in their lexical versions are among some of the most commonly occurring ones in Indic languages of Dravidian and Indo Aryan families with intriguing behavior leading to syntactic function inversion in translation. These are taken as primary candidates for investigation leading to other groups of English lexical verbs that exhibit similar behavior in translation between English and Tamil.

The significance of this exploration lies in explicating crosslinguistic non-correspondence in behavior of one sub-set of lexical verbs in Tamil vis-à-vis English and thus help elucidate the rationale behind determining the referred sense in a text for translation as well as make appropriate choices of equivalence and translation technique in producing the target language text. I am sure the elucidation will also add significantly to the insights underpinning the development of NLP algorithms. The study is extendable across Indic language pairs and between English and other Indic languages, of Dravidian and Indo Aryan families.

Keywords: Syntactic Function Inversion, Lexical Verb Transfer, English and Tamil, Construal, Cross-linguistic transfer, Event structure, Predicator Verb.

Introduction

Mediation of predicate verbs in translation, i.e., cross-linguistic transfer, depends on how the event itself denoted by the predicate verb is construed and re-expressed from a source language (SL) text to a target language (TL) text. The issue then becomes one of examining the event structure that a verb in the predicator gives rise to. This paper attempts to explain the predicator verb transfer between English and Tamil proceeding from a simple syntactic categorization of the verb, through its argument realization, to the semantic content of the verb and the event structure.

The verbs ‘like’ and ‘have’ in their lexical versions are taken as candidates for this investigation. Both exhibit a triggering role in translation shift in terms of syntactic function inversion – i.e., change of the subject into object or complement. While the verb ‘like’ is explored for all its sense groups given by the possible sub-categorization frames, the verb ‘have’ is dealt with only for those sense groups whose meaning extension stays within the ambit of its core meaning of ‘possession’.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. R. Saranya
CAS in Linguistics, Annamalai University
drsaranyaraja@gmail.com

Shakir Azeem C B.
Ph.D. Research Scholar
CAS in Linguistics, Annamalai University
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