Particle Homonymy and Machine Translation

Particle Homonymy and Machine Translation K6roly F&bricz JATE University of Szeged, Egyetem u. 2. Hungary I[ - 6722 Abstract The purpose of this contribution is to formulate ways in which the homonymy of so- called 'Modal Particles' and their etymons can be handled. Our aim is to show that not only a strategy for this type of homonymy can be worked out, but also a formalization of information beyond propositional content can be introduced with a view to its MT ap- plication. 1. Introduction During the almost 40 years of its exist- ence machine translation has undergone a con- siderable refinement in the fields of both syntactic parsing and semantic representa- tion. The development of MT can be seen as a tendency to incorporate more and more lin- guistic knowledge into [:he formalization of translational processes. Formalization has thus become a keyword for MT and has had sev- eral major implications. Firstly, it refers to the hypothesis that everything related to a given language is s t r u c t u r e d in one way or another. Secondly, formalization is an o b j e c t i v e m e a n s of tes- ting the validity of the linguist's hypoth- eses about linguistic phenomena. Thirdly, it involves the linguist's h o p e that any- thing that has to do with language can in fact be formalized. At present, there are several semantic theories which could be labelled "formal se- mantics". They are preoccupied with explo- ring the propositional content of different text-units and they do not deal with the phenomenon of "subjectivity". Subjectivity, or self-expression, as ]Lyons /1981, 240/ has pointed out, "cannot be reduced to the ex- pression of propositional knowledge and be- liefs". If we think of MT in its ideal form, i.e. not as an abstracting device, but as a system producing automatic translation, then the inadequacy of restriction to proposi- tional content wi]l be evident° The present paper sets out to show that the expression of lexical subjectivity, con- veyed by modal particles, should, and can, be accounted for in the process of MT. 2. Particle Homony_my Let us consider the following pairs of sentences: i a. There is ~n~u a little beer left. b. ~ was ? ~ too pleased to leave that p~ace. 2 a. Nur ihn hatte man vergessen. b. Woz~ babe ich nut gelebt? 3 a. Vous partez ddja? b. Comment vous vous appelez ddja? 4 a. ~pu~oCume ~ ~a~ u saempa. b. ~ u ~le enam, ~mo c~asamo. 5 a. Ann~ is elj~n hozzdnk? b. Hol is tartottunk? The words underlined in the b. example of each pair of sentences belong to a word- group now more or less uniformly referred to as 'Modal Particles' /cf. Arndt 1960/. These words represent, in Arndt's term, a granunatical no-man's-land, although in the past ten years there has been a considerable interest towards modal particles. 59 Words like the English ~ or the Ger- man nur …

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