A French-English Grammar

“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).”

“Morris Salkoff is an excellent specialist in the field of Mechanical Translation. He is bilingual English/French and has focused on this pair of languages for many years. He has produced a formal grammar of these languages of a remarkable quality. The book presents this transfer grammar, along with general principles to build a new generation translation procedure. I consider this book extremely valuable, and of interest, not only to the specialists of the field of MT, but to comparatist linguists who intend to build contrastive grammars for teaching purposes.”