Disambiguation of Particles: Hindi-To-English

By Anil Thakur

This book examines the distribution and disambiguation patterns of selected particle elements of Hindi in the context of Hindi-English translation. The particle elements play a major role in determining the meaning of a sentence and also in its various interpretations. That makes it imperative to devise some ways to disambiguate their different meanings in various contexts. This complex issue has been addressed in the book by studying the distribution and classification of the particle elements and that has been used to further disambiguate their meanings and present mapping rules for each meaning/interpretation of a particle element.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Dec 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482868258

Anil Thakur

Dr Anil Thakur obtained his PhD in Linguistics from University of Delhi specializing in generative grammar and comparative linguistics analysis. Presently he teaches at the Department of Linguistics of Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India.

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Copyright © 2015 by Anil Thakur.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgement

Preface

1.   Introduction

1.1 Introduction

1.2 Approach

1.3 Outlines

2.   Particles In Hindi:.  Distribution And Disambiguation

2.1 Outlines

2.2 Distribution of Particle Elements

2.3 Disambiguation

3.   Summary

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

1. University Grants Commission of India for financial support in the form of Major Research Project.

2. Prof RMK Sinha of IIT Kanpur for sharing his ideas on mapping rules in Hindi-English MT in the form of our joint research papers.

3. My parents for their blessings and my wife Sanjukta and my daughter Abhijna for support and happiness.

PREFACE

T his work is an attempt to identify, classify and disambiguate the different senses / functions of a selected list of particle elements in Hindi. An attempt is made to formulate rules for contexualization and disambiguation of the different senses of these particle elements along with contextualization of their mapping patterns in their English translation. This has been done with particular objective of the application of this knowledgebase for Hindi-English (machine) translation. Particle elements selected for this work are not only those words that are traditionally called particles or discourse particle/markers, adverbial particles, etc. but also those words that generally have been categorized in grammar as conjunction, complementizer, question words, etc. but act as particle in contexts other than their canonical use. For instance, kyaa in Hindi grammar, most typically an interrogative pronoun, occurs in different pragmatic roles. Similarly, ki that is typically a complementizer element has multiple pragmatic functions across different contexts and can be studied as particle elements in these functions. In certain cases, the words termed here as particle elements occur in phrasal forms and have pragmatic role in the determination of the meaning of the constructions of their occurence. For instance, kyaa-kaa-kyaa or kyaa-se-kyaa , are also treated as particle elements because of their pragmatic functions in these uses.

Traditionally, particles have been treated as minor elements in the grammar of a natural language, against their major counterparts such as nouns, verbs, etc. and consequently received scant attention in grammars and linguistic research. Although, their important role in the contribution to the information structure of a sentence has always been pointed out and their multiple pragmatic roles have also been listed in grammar books. In recent decades, scholars and researchers have turned towards the study of particle elements across languages emphasizing their important position in the information structuring of language utterances and their complexities as players of multiple pragmatic roles in multiple guise (as discourse particles, modal particles, etc.). Particularly with the realization of the significant role of linguistic research and resources in the form of analyzed corpus, grammar rules and lexicon for the development of language technology tools, study of different aspects of grammar including the particle elements have got good amount of attention by the researchers in theoretical linguistics as well as computational linguistics working towards the development of various language tools across languages. A comparative grammatical study of a pair of human languages taking all the grammatical categories including so-called major and minor categories also becomes imperative in the context of multilingual applications of natural language processing. The significant role that so-called monir grammatical categories like particles play in information encoding is manifested in a complex manner in which they are situated in a sentence structure. Languages show good degree of divergence as to how a grammatical element is structured in the language like its position of occurrence, meanings/senses they convey, whether lexically, morphologically or syntactically manifested, etc. This is true with respect to particle elements across languages. Particles show complexity at various levels: distributionally they occur across almost all the syntactic positions in a sentence and semantically they carry out a bundle of functions that are as diverse as syntactic to discourse markers. Hindi has a large number of particle elements and show complexities with respect to their distribution as well as their sense associations. On the other hand, English also has a large number of particle elements including verb particles, nominal particles and adverbial particles. However, the distributional patterns of the particle elements in Hindi and English