Rule to convert a compound verb into a simple verb

Question

A user asks:

I have a situation where in the source they express “recognize” or “identify” with two verbs which both take subject prefixes:

0-bagu                0-xabia
3s.S-see            3s.S-know
he/she/it recognizes

di-bagu              da-xabia
3p.S-see            3p.S-know
they recognize

In the target, this is only expressed with one verb xabia “recognize”. The one-for-one target translation is *mamala sama “see know”. So, when run through the rules, I want two consecutive verbs converted to one in only this instance. If I write a new rule above my Verbs rule that takes as its input two verb items, trapping for the Mato bagu xabia, will that prevent the Verbs rule (which only has one input) from firing? If so, how do I handle this situation?

Answer 1

Regardless of where you put the rule, if there is a two-verb rule will run before a one-verb rule. In general the 3-pattern-item rules run before the 2-pattern-item which run before the 1-pattern-item rules. Rules that are of equal pattern-length, will run in the order they are listed.

Now in regard to your Verbs rule being skipped if the 2-verb rule fires. Yes, the rule will get skipped so if you have stuff in the Verbs rule that you want to run on one of the verbs, you need to have the same rule logic in the 2-verb rule that does your general verb tweaking. The best way to handle this is by making a macro that contains all the common logic that you want in both rules. Then call the macro in each rule.

Does that make sense?

See also: Does the order of transfer rules matter? - Support.Bible Forum

Comments

The user replies:

Ok. I did that.

However, the Live Rule Tester seems to imply that the singular Verb rule gets executed first, then the Phrasal Verb rule gets executed too.

Is this a bug? Or am I missing something?

---

It looks like it is working, right?

The yellow box is the execution log from Apertium and it does show both rules, but I think it is doing the right thing. The Shorter match gets ignored.

---

The user replies:

Yes, it’s working. It’s just that the Live Rule Tester Rule Execution Information doesn’t seem to match what you said, and may need to be tweaked to imply the right thing. Perhaps you have little to no control over that, but if what you said is the way it works, then the feedback given in this box should reflect that.

---

The yellow box in the Live Rule Tester should have a better label. What is shown there is not which rules were executed, rather which rules were matched on the input text. As we say in our training, we need to remember that if multiple words are matched for a rule, that takes precedence over a single word matched.