Patterns with Transitive Verb and Reflexive in English and their Counterparts in Japanese: A Bilingual Pattern Grammar Approach
Makoto Shimizu, Masaki Murata · 2004
In translating from one language into another, there is a tendency to use the same type of expressions. For example, one often attempts to translate English reflexives into Japanese reflexives. However, most English reflexives in the object position, which is supposed to be the typical position for a reflexive to occur, tend not to be translated into Japanese reflexives. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how English reflexives actually behave and to discuss a possible treatment of the translation problem. We focused on reflexives which co-occur with transitive verbs. We extracted examples of such reflexives and their Japanese counterparts, and analysed them both syntactically and semantically. First, we examined the BNC, and checked the frequencies of English transitive verbs and those of English reflexives as the object. We then consulted an English-Japanese dictionary to ascertain what explanations the dictionary gives of the extracted transitive verbs and reflexives. As a next step, we extracted sentence examples with transitive verb plus reflexive patterns and their Japanese counterparts from four bilingual parallel corpora. We found that English reflexives tend to correspond to several types of Japanese expressions according to the verb groups they belong to.