Problems of equivalence in some German and English constructions

The time has come when well-organized and thoroughly worked out transfer grammars should be developed. Such a grammar should be composed of formal statements equating the construction-types of the input language with those of the output language and indicating the appropriate transformations which must be made to produce the target language constructions. In connection with the problem of structural transfer, a study was made of the behavior of some English verbs and their German equivalents in a fixed number of constructions. The verbs were grouped in syntactic classes on the basis of their respective distributions. The conditions were stated under which it is possible to use the same combination of constituents in a construction when translating from German to English and vice versa. This work should be regarded as a preliminary study of that information about syntactic restrictions on verbs which should be encoded in an automatic dictionary as an aid in solving problems of structural transfer.