[lkb] Arabic Comparative Grammar suggestion

[phipps at buffalo.edu]

Ahmad and the lkb community, I agree with Emily that there are not
likely to be any existing resources immediately available that will meet
your needs, so original work will probably have to be done.  There is
nontechnical work on Arabic and English within the contrastive
linguistics field that may be helpful.

I'm working on some issues in contrastive linguistics so I have included
some general resources that might be helpful; if anyone does want to
build a resource like the one Ahmed needs I'd be very interested in the
project.  I have only reviewed the Mancere article so I'm not sure about
the quality of the others, but the Abu-Arafah dissertation looks promising.

Chris Phipps
graduate student
Linguistics Department
The University at Buffalo, SUNY
wings.buffalo.edu/~phipps

________________
References for Arabic Contrastive Linguistics

Mancere, M.  1995. Meta.  Translating Arabic into English: basic
considerations in word order. 

HASSAN, HASSAN M.  1990.  A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF TENSE AND ASPECT IN
ENGLISH AND ARABIC WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO TRANSLATION.
UNIVERSITY OF BATH (UNITED KINGDOM), 1990, 249 pages

Abu-Arafah, Adnan Ghazi.  1996. A Grammar for the Arabic Language
Suitable for Machine Parsing and Automatic Text Generation. 
Dissertation Abstracts International, B: Sciences and Engineering, 1996,
56, 11, May, 6217-B-6218-B

Plunkett, Bernadette.  1993. The Position of Subjects in Modern Standard
Arabic.  PERSPECTIVES ON ARABIC LINGUISTICS V: PAPERS FROM THE FIFTH
ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ON ARABIC LINGUISTICS, Eid, Mushira, & Holes, Clive
[Eds], Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company,
1993, pp 231-260

ZEINAB IBRAHIM  2000. Diversity in Language:  Contrastive Studies in
English and Arabic Theoretical Applied Linguistics. The American
University in Cairo Press.

Hatim, Basil.  1997. Communication Across Cultures:Translation Theory
and Contrastive Text Linguistics.  University of Exeter Press. 

Al-Jarf, R. S. 2004. Word order errors in English-Arabic translations. 
King Saud University.  (this is a pdf of a course lecture; you can find
it at
http://www.arabicwata.org/Arabic/The_WATA_Library/Lectures/Sample_Lectures/2004/february/Lecture1.pdf)



Quoting "Emily M. Bender" <ebender at u.washington.edu>:

> Dear Ahmad,
> 
> I doubt that what you seek exists in general and
> I can say with near certainty that no such thing exists
> in an LKB-compatible framework: you'd need to build it.
> 
> However, the main MT paradigm used by folks working
> with the LKB/other DELPH-IN resources is to do 
> semantics (MRS) level transfer.  For more on how
> this works, see the publications of the LOGON project:
> 
> www.emmtee.net
> 
> As you'll see there, that project involves the combined
> efforts of many people.  While there may be some results
> you can build on from other work, I fear that you'll
> need to scale back the goals of your project.
> 
> Emily
> 
> On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 06:11:11AM -0700, ahmed hafez wrote:
> > Dear Emily 
> > 
> > I cannot describe my gratitute for you being
> > interested in my research. 
> > 
> > What I mean by comparative grammar is simply a grammar
> > that tells the equivanlent Arabic synsem structure of
> > an English one. So for instance if the structure of an
> > English sentence is S=NP VP a comparative grammar
> > should tell that the Arabic equivalent is S= VP NP
> > because most Arabic sentences begin with the verb.
> > This is just a simplification because the Arabic
> > language allows a great deal of freedom in the
> > arrangement of the components of a 
> > sentence.
> > 
> > So the comparative grammar is the bridge that crosses
> > the gap between the analysis of an English sentence
> > (using TRALE or LKB) and the generation of the Arabic
> > output using a generator I have not found yet.
> > 
> > Thanks a lot.
> > 
> > Best -Ahmad
> > 
> > 
> > 		
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> 
>