LINGUIST List 7.342

Mon Mar 4 1996

Qs: Machine translation, Pre IP heads, Usage of MUST

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <dizdartam2000.tamu.edu>

Directory

1. Harold E. "Skip" Wilcox, English-Arabic/Arabic-English machine translation
2. Annabel Cormack, Q: pre IP heads
3. Debra.Ziegelerarts.monash.edu.au, Q: MUST again

Does anyone know of any English-Arabic and/or Arabic/English
translation software? Pls respond directly to me.

Harold E. "Skip" Wilcox, Ph.D.

There are languages with the equivalent of _who that_, and languages
with the equivalent of _if that_. I believe there are languages where
all three pre-IP heads may occur in sequence, perhaps in a complement
clause as in

 I don't know [whom if that John saw _]

Can anyone tell me of such a language?

Annabel Cormack.

Dear Subscribers,

Here's another question for all modal maniacs. A sentence very much
like the following was recently emitted from the bowels of
bureaucracy, inadvertently making its way onto the Home Page of a
local university administration Web service. The sentence aroused my
curiosity, and I have been pondering over it ever since. it went
something like this:

All forms must have been submitted by February 16.

The reason I was pondering over it was that it appeared prior to
February 16. My personal intuitions would have constrained the use of
MUST in such a construction, mainly because it offers a deontic
interpretation (having come from an administrator's office!), and the
(usual) interpretation of MUST + HAVE + past participle could be
assumed to be only epistemic. I was wondering what other subscribers
thought about the use of MUST used deontically in a future perfect
construction such as this - deviant? or ambiguous?

If this arouses enough enthusiasm, a summary of responses will follow.

Debra Ziegeler
Monash University, Australia