Re: Fw: Intro to natural language processing
Rob,
I would prefer not to get involved in the debate
between you and John Bateman. But since you
cited my note of October 19th about tense and
aspect, I thought I'd mention an interesting
remark I heard recently.
I was talking with a colleague from Australia
about aspect and happened to mention the Chinese
particle "le", which indicates perfective aspect.
His eyes immediately lit up with a sudden flash
of understanding because a Chinese friend of his
was constantly inserting "le" into English
sentences, such as
I come le tomorrow.
This is a one-to-one replacement of Chinese words
with English words in a Chinese sentence pattern.
It omits the English future marker "will" or "shall"
because Chinese doesn't have one.
But since English does not have a perfective marker
that corresponds to "le", the speaker merely left
the Chinese marker untranslated in his sentence.
John Sowa
PS: Following is the note of Oct 19th, which
discusses the topic of tense and aspect:
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/suo/email/msg12740.html