Syntactic analysis

[kleinerandroid]

Could someone help me with my analysis of the following sentence, please?

'New clinical trials show that including garlic in the diet can reduce cholesterol.'

Comments

[akibare]

For what it's worth, I worked on a machine translation system long ago now (late 1980's to early 1990's). I worked on the Japanese to English translation program specifically. I started at that company fresh out of high school, doing data entry. (I was hired based on a written examination, part of which was translation and part of which was diagramming sentences in both Japanese and English, so to all those people who laugh and say "why should I ever learn to diagram a sentence in school??" I can say, hey, it got at least ONE person a job!)

At that company, they DID have a sense that semantic "sense" mattered, particularly with verb-object relationships. So we had a system where we could put some "semantic categories" on words (particularly nouns) so that later if they were being parsed in common with a verb it would trigger some rules about translating the verb. One extreme example: the Japanese verb 掛ける (kakeru) The definition of that word goes on for pages in the dictionary. It's similar to "take" or "get" or "sit" in English, as far as that "takes up pages in the dictionary" goes. But in the concrete sense (already only one of many definitions) it means to "put something on/over" something else. So if it's a liquid (like soy sauce), the English ends up "pour," if it's a blanket, it's more like "cover with." So the program would check to see if the object was marked as "liquid" for instance and change the translation of the verb. It was crude, but the idea was there. As you say, it's a necessary idea I think.

I notice in many of your posts you talk about "collocations," I find that interesting too, I found them naively on my own and would make note of them when reading books. Now I see there are various collocation dictionaries in Japanese (Japanese to Japanese, for regular Japanese speakers) I have bought some.

When I was a kid there was a game show 連想ゲーム ("rensou ge-mu" = "association game") on NHK where a questioner would give a word and their team would have to guess an associated word. This was of course very much based on collocations and also literary references, there are some words which just "go with" other words, OR that everyone associates because they know a famous quote. I was just realizing about collocation myself and loved this show. With certain objects, the verb is obvious, similarly certain adverbs (or in Japanese, 擬態語 "gitaigo" onomatopoeia not necessarily about sounds) are associated with certain verbs or even objects, it's handy to know.

[greenkrokodilla]

Yep, thanks.
Machine translation is a fascinating area, and machines' inability to understand semantics are at the core of the general failure of such systems.

HERE IS A (PARTIAL) ENTRY for a frequent word "LEAVE":

leave ( leaves 3rd person present) ( leaving present participle) ( left past tense & past participle )

1 verb If you leave a place or person, you go away from that place or person.
He would not be allowed to leave the country... V n
I simply couldn't bear to leave my little girl... V n
My flight leaves in less than an hour... V
The last of the older children had left for school. V for n

2 verb If you leave an institution, group, or job, you permanently stop attending that institution, being a member of that group, or doing that job.
He left school with no qualifications... V n
I am leaving to concentrate on writing fiction. V
...a leaving present. V-ing

3 verb If you leave your husband, wife, or some other person with whom you have had a close relationship, you stop living with them or you finish the relationship.
He'll never leave you. You need have no worry... V n
I would be insanely jealous if Bill left me for another woman. V n for n, Also V

4 verb If you leave something or someone in a particular place, you let them remain there when you go away. If you leave something or someone with a person, you let them remain with that person so they are safe while you are away.
From the moment that Philippe had left her in the bedroom at the hotel, she had heard nothing of him... V n prep/adv
Leave your key with a neighbour in case you lock yourself out one day. V n with n

5 verb If you leave a message or an answer, you write it, record it, or give it to someone so that it can be found or passed on.
You can leave a message on our answering machine... V n prep/adv
Decide whether the ball is in square A, B, C, or D, then call and leave your answer... V n
I left my phone number with several people. V n with n

6 verb If you leave someone doing something, they are doing that thing when you go away from them.
Salter drove off, leaving Callendar surveying the scene. V n -ing

7 verb If you leave someone to do something, you go away from them so that they do it on their own. If you leave someone to himself or herself, you go away from them and allow them to be alone.
I'd better leave you to get on with it, then... V n to-inf
Diana took the hint and left them to it... V n to it
One of the advantages of a department store is that you are left to yourself to try things on... be V-ed to pron-refl

This is what a "combined" description of a verb with its patterns + its semantics may look like. Taken from a real dictionary for foreign learners of English.

[greenkrokodilla]

(continued)
It may seem to a native speaker of English that - because there is a general logical thread connecting different uses of LEAVE, running through these sub-senses, that some of them may be lumped together and redefined as (Oxford dict):

1. cause to or let remain, depart without taking, have at time of one's death.
2. abstain from consuming or dealing with; (in pass) remain over;
3 let remain in unspecified state
and so on

That's how they tried to explain language in the 19 century, and that mindless tradition still survives - well, it is actually thriving in monstrosities like Merriam-Webster.

However each of those semantically restricted groupings may have a different "translation" in another language. As another common example of "break" shows, breaking a bone, a machine, relations, ice or glass (taking only 4 examples) would require 3 different verbs in, say, Russian. You mentioned a Japanese idea of "cover" in a similar vein.

That is because language reflects our thinking, it is actually a "photographic picture", a snapshot of our concept of the world. And while human wetware works in the same way across races and cultures, the concrete "ideas" and how they are applied to the external world, differ a lot.

So the big shame is that it is difficult (although not impossible by now, at least partially) to create computer translation programs, which would look at a text and try to determine if "mumble-mumble-muble", some Noun Phrase it managed to parse out/delimit, or a that-clause, are an example of "a place or a person"? or is it "an institution or a group"? or "a husband or wife"? - so that an answer to that would trigger the correct translation.

Today they would just try to figure it out by differences in (our example) Verb Patterns:
"leave someone to do something" is not the same as "leave someone doing something" and is different from "leave someone in a particular place"
Or - "the google approach" - they would try to find statistical similarity/overlap between your phrase and whatever they've got in their corpus.
Producing heaps of hilarious mistranslations along the way.