REPORTING VERBS: A STUDY ON THE BEHAVIOUR OF DUTCH, ENGLISH, GERMAN AND FRENCH PERFECTS.

Abstract

Reporting verbs are verbs used to report that something was stated, like ‘say’, ‘ask’, ‘tell’ and ‘promise’. The perfect form of verbs in these languages is formed in a manner that resembles one another to a large degree, with each having an auxiliary verb (to be/to have) with a past particle. For example, in the sentence “I have known him for a long time.”, ‘have’ is the auxiliary verb and ‘known’ is the past particle.

In addition, this research follows from the Time in Translation project in which reporting verbs were not examined. An objective of this study is thus to prove that there are differences between reporting verbs and verbs in general and to compare the results to other studies conducted within formal and informal language use.

In this research, several programs were employed to collect, connect and compare reporting verbs from the EUROPARL corpus. Artificial Intelligence is an essential and crucial tool in accurately processing data collected. Algorithms were used to extract the perfects from the EUROPARL corpus and to link them up with corresponding contexts from the other languages so as to create the semantic maps. Results uncovered an aspect of the mechanism behind the perfect form that can lead to a better understanding of and possible better algorithms for translating verbs and their tenses, thus making machine translations more intuitive, precise and effective.