On the Sentence Category Transfer of Action-effect Sentences in Chinese-English Machine Translation

Of the 57 basic sentence categories (SC) defined in the HNC theory, action-effect SC is an important one with distinctive features. In the light of the HNC conceptual network, action-effect sentences in the Chinese language arise directly from causative verbs and compelling verbs, and indirectly from general acting verbs, i.e. via the use of the " de(4)" construction. In Chinese-English machine translation, action-effect sentences follow different SC and SF (sentence format) transfer rules. Therefore, different transfer frames should be adopted so as to ensure the generation of TL sentences with proper syntactico-semantic structures. Experiments show that the rules underlying the SC-SF transfer of action-effect sentences from Chinese to English can cover 90.3% of all the sentences in question.