Transitive verb plus reflexive pronoun/personal pronoun patterns in English and Japanese: using a Japanese-English parallel corpus

Abstract

We examine the distribution of the transitive verb plus reflexive pronoun/personal pronoun patterns in English and in Japanese. We extract from a Japanese-English parallel corpus examples of the English patterns ‘transitive verb followed by reflexive pronoun’ and ‘transitive verb followed by personal pronoun’ together with their counterparts in Japanese. We estimate the distribution statistically, through a method developed by one of the authors. Then, we analyse the expressions syntactically and semantically, noting especially which types in one language correspond to which types in the other language. Certain types of verbs together with reflexive pronouns in English, for instance, are often translated into intransitive verbs in Japanese, and so on. We attempt to show that it makes more sense to focus on phrase alignments rather than word alignments when considering the correspondence between reflexive pronouns/personal pronouns in English and their counterparts in Japanese.