A French-English Grammar

In this contrastive French-English grammar, the comparisons between French structures and their English equivalents are formulated as rules which associate a French schema (of a particular grammatical structure) with its translation into an equivalent English schema. The grammar contains all the rules giving the English equivalents under translation of the principal grammatical structures of French: the verb phrase, the noun phrase and the adjuncts (modifiers). In addition to its intrinsic linguistic interest, this comparative grammar has two important applications. The translation equivalences it contains can provide a firm foundation for the teaching of the techniques of translation. Furthermore, such a comparative grammar is a necessary preliminary to any program of machine translation, which needs a set of formal rules, like those given here for the French-to-English case, for translating into a target language the syntactic structures encountered in the source language.

Sharon I. Shelly, College of Wooster:
Salkoff‘s grammar is organized as a kind of "syntactic lexicon" of schemata types, progressing from major sentence structures (Verb Phrase and Noun Phrase) to adjuncts (optional Prepositional Phrases and adverbials). His extremely rigorous analysis of a broad range of schemata has allowed the author to propose some ingenious solutions to classic problems of French-English translation. For example, his treatment of "support verbs", based on work by Maurice Gross, seems to provide a unified account for a large number of cases including many expressions traditionally classed as idioms (faire fi, faire (une) allusion à, faire cas de, etc.). Similarly, Salkoff has identified for major lexical categories (N, V, and Adj) the semantic and syntactic sub-classes most relevant to French –English translation: thus, classifications like Nhcoll (collective human noun), Nprof (trade or profession); and Nartist can allow the module to distinguish among chez nos adversaires ("into our enemies’ territory"), chez le dentiste ("to the dentist"), and chez Picasso ("in the works of Picasso).