A COGNITIVE TREATMENT OF ASPECT IN JAPANESE TO CHINESE MACHINE TRANSLATION

Sentential aspect is the integrated function of lexical main verbs, aspect markers, adverbials, subjects and objects, and other syntactic constituents. The present approach represents sentential aspect by situation types and further distinction of aspectual meaning. Situation types are the basic categorization of situations that human make on the basis of their perceptual and cognitive faculties. Seven situation types are distinguished in this article, which include events (accomplishments, processes, achievements and activities), states, habituals and generics. Accomplishments and achievements express perfectivity, whereas others imperfectivity. Perfectivity and imperfectivity can be further distinguished into subdivions such as 'telic' and 'perfective', and 'habitual', 'delimitative' and 'continuous' respectively. Based on the situation type and the further distinction of aspectual meaning of a source language, the generation of verbs, aspect markers and adverbials for a target language can be properly made. In this paper, the translation of aspect from Japanese to Chinese is described in detail. The problem that several aspect markers occur together in a sentence is also discussed.