Some notes on Russian predicative infinitives in automatic translation

Some considerations are presented regarding certain aspects of automatically translating Russian predicative infinitives into English. Emphasis is placed on the analysis (decoding) of the pertinent infinitive constructions in the source language rather than on the synthesis (encoding) of their equivalents in the target language. The paper does not aim at an exhaustive treatment of the problem, but merely offers some tentative and peripheral suggestions as well as some criticism of previous endeavors to tackle the problem of Russian predicative infinitives in machine translation.