Tuesday, November 27, 2007

To+infinitive ..A Naughty Child!

some days before I came across a document which says English grammar is not able to define the clause in the perfect manner! As some books says..there are three types of clauses as Finite,
Non-finite, and verbless. But I haven't found much document related to non-finite clause & verbless clause which is authentic(If any one has Idea plz fwd me).
BTW the problem now I am discussing is "TO+Infinitive".
For the English to Hindi Machine Translation system....if the English sentence is:
"I want to go home."
the Hindi translation is: "Mai ghar jana chahata hun".......(I am not using any standard transliteration system..so excuse)
But the problem is that here the WANT is main verb and the TO GO is the To+infinitive...and here problem arrives that of what this TO Go should be considered as a NOun or Verb ...
if verb then many problems arise like only one sentence contains the 2 verbs....
if this is treated as the noun in many sentences like "I want him to go home"..
creates the problem as xlation in this case is :"Mai waha ghar jaye yaha chahata hun"...
here this "ghar" and "jaye" have changed their places/positions.
So it seems that here the To infinitive is working as the verb of subject HIM( though can't be in this form).....And if we see many sentences with To infinitive or the bare infinitive ..many other pattern will be found bringing more confusion into the process..!
What do u think Dear....?

1 comment:

आलोक said...

ACGOTEL - Quirk et al.
Everything's in it. Just what we need. And yeah - our imagination also.