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

[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.