French-English Grammar

In this contrastive French-English grammar, the comparisons between French structures and their English equivalents are formulated as rules which associate a French schema (of a particular grammatical structure) with its translation into an equivalent English schema. The grammar contains all the rules giving the English equivalents under translation of the principal grammatical structures of French: the verb phrase, the noun phrase and the adjuncts (modifiers). In addition to its intrinsic linguistic interest, this comparative grammar has two important applications. The translation equivalences it contains can provide a firm foundation for the teaching of the techniques of translation. Furthermore, such a comparative grammar is a necessary preliminary to any program of machine translation, which needs a set of formal rules, like those given here for the French-to-English case, for translating into a target language the syntactic structures encountered in the source language.