Handling target lg verb phrase affixes

Question

What's the best way to handle verb to verb phrase translations? In Mato (source lg) we have harungia 'speak against' which is rendered as pasila suki mana 'speak slip about' in Uma (target lg). The source verb can take both a subject and an object. The target language verb phrase requires a subject prefix (on the verb which is the first word in the phrase), but will not tolerate an object suffix: da-harungia-di '3p.S-speak against-3p.O / they speak them against'   >  di-pasila suki mana '3p.S-speak slip about'. I can strip the object with a rule. But to synthesize the target word means that I need to do the following in the target lexicon: 1. Define a template for verb phrases, 2. Populate the subject slot with the subject prefixes, then 3. Redefine the glosses for the verb phrase glosses to something like 3p.S2, which would then send me back to writing a rule to handle all the alternate glosses (3p.S>3p.S2, etc) for synthesizing within the target database. It was at point 3 that this became really cumbersome, and I'm wondering if there's an easier solution?

Answer 1

Hi matoxltr,

FLExTrans has good support for phrasal verbs. See How do I deal with phrasal verbs using FLExTrans? l in the documentation. Or if you like try the new chatbot on the FLExTrans website. I used the prompt "How do I deal with a source verb that maps to a phrasal verb in the target?" Let me know if you have questions following the steps.

Comments

Thank you. The part I was missing was to set the complex form type to PHRASAL VERB.

---

Correct URL is:

https://software.sil.org/downloads/r/flextrans/resources/UserDoc.htm#sPhrasalVerbs