Teaching English Verbs With Bilingual Corpora - CLILLAC-ARP
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1. and can be at the same time extremely casual as shown in the following example which has been extracted from the comp lang perl misc newsgroup 5 You should either use double quotes or joins but not both Either file dir dir dir country _ machine Or preferably at least to me file dir dir dir country_ machine should be file dir dir dir country machine Our newsgroups contains for the time being approximately a thousand articles ca 6500 types iv FAQs Frequently Asked Questions FAQs are often related to some newsgroup and consist of files that contain the most frequently asked questions on a given subject For example FAQs about the following subject are available Y2K bug Solaris OS or even Windows v General English To relativize the results and examine them from different angles we use general English corpora such as The Times 3 500 000 words or The Herald Tribune 1 500 000 words Other CS English corpora allow us to check specialised uses general English corpora are used to verify the degree of specialisation of the selected verbs 2 2 Frequencies A first sampling of our corpus permitted us to obtain a list of the most frequent verbs In the highest frequencies of the HOWTOs the first three verbs once auxiliaries and modals were discarded are the following Use 3114 occurrences run 1565 occurrences install 1163 occurrences2. the translation standardized by the Commission de Terminologie Informatique of the Ministry of Culture is amorce for the noun and amorcer for the verb these are specialised uses of already existing terms that roughly mean start However if the noun amorce can be found in our French corpus the verb amorcer occurs very rarely Looking for the French equivalents of the verb to boot in the French corpus reveals d marrer lancer and less often the anglicism booter 18 a You can specify various hardware parameters before booting the Linux kernel b Vous pouvez pr ciser diff rents param tres mat riels avant de d marrer le noyau Linux 19 a The system doesn t boot at all b Le syst me ne boote plus du tout 20 a LILO is a program that will allow you to boot Linux b LILO est un programme vous permettant de lancer Linux 12 We use here the notation used in the theoretical and methodological frame of the lexicon grammar in which for example Nhum represents a human noun i e all the nouns that can be considered as humans girl driver linguist guy etc M Gross 1975 M thodes en Syntaxe Klinsieck Paris B This is particularly true in the GNU initiative and Linux community 4 http www m w com S http www cogsci princeton edu wn Doing the job the other way round i e analysing the English equivalents of d marrer and lancer not only allowed us to confirm to boot but also to discover to run to launch
3. A second type of query dealt with the context in which each verb can be found individually in order to extract their distributional and transformational properties These examples of concordances were also edited for presentation to the students What was at stake consisted in making the students aware of the verbs behaviour via the contact with authentic data Data driven approaches for language teaching often recommend comparing the examples extracted from a corpus with the descriptions that can be found in reference books B Dodd 1997 in Wichman et al for example This is not possible to achieve with CS English as there are no descriptions of CS English verbs The comparison with the general English uses however can lead to extract specialised English verbs Our reference corpus Linux HOWTOs has been translated into different languages Our English corpus can be aligned with its French translations The French and English corpora were aligned paragraph by paragraph by a perl script developed with and included into our series of tools the Wall environment Since the alignment is not always perfect translators can decide to add or delete sections the corresponding paragraph can then be manually searched for Our tool allows the user to query either one of the corpora cf Figure 1 and then to search for each occurrence of a verb for its equivalent in the other language cf Figure 2 Words preceded by an asterisk do not exist in the gi
4. FR Votre BIOS ne vous permettra peut tre pas de d marrer directement a partir d un disque SCSI EN Your BIOS mau not allow you to boot to a Linux installed there FR Votre BIOS peut ne pas vous permettre de d marrer un syst me Linux qui y serait install 16 No is the noun in the subject position N the nouns in the object position and N the nouns in the position of second object 10 In this context lancer can also very rarely be translated by to launch which is a more general verb In radically different contexts such as lancer une command to run to issue and to type can be found The structures and arguments described above show the difference between the general verb to boot and the highly subject specific neologism fo boot Apart from the distinct etymological origin which is however not very useful from a synchronic point of view the neologism to boot presents structures as well as arguments that are very different from the general verb This is illustrated by the two examples below which have been extracted from a concordance on the Herald Tribune 21 In early 1988 the Saudis booted out Hume A Horan 22 eating habits under control by booting the French chef and his staff The next The next sub section deals with the problem of verbs that already exist in general English and that also have highly technical uses 3 2 Specialised uses Numerous verbs existing in general English can be found in the comput
5. Institute Oregon State University Vance S 1995 Concordances with Language Learners Why When What CAELL Journal vol 6 n 2 Wichmann A S Fligelstone A McEnery and G Knowles eds 1997 Teaching and Language Corpora Longman London
6. Using 1726 run 886 install 662 Used 1192 running 523 installed 369 Use 196 partly nominal runs 140 ie a very low installing 132 occurrences percentage of nouns The number of occurrences very quickly drops to a few hundreds to boot has around 500 verbal occurrences or even less than a hundred to download has around 40 These results can be compared with the frequencies in The Times where the three most frequent verbs are use run general English uses and not CS English and call Use 30324 occurrences run 26697 occurrences call 13771 occurrences Used 13333 run 12773 called 12445 Use 11363 runs 4517 call 5922 Using 4333 running 6541 calls 3601 Uses 1295 ran 2866 calling 1793 The frequencies in the French corpus i e the French translations of the HOWTOs are surprisingly different The most frequent verb is utiliser with more than 2000 occurrences the next verb fonctionner plummets to around 300 occurrences and the rest are even rarer This shows that French translations of verbs are different depending on the uses among the various uses of to run one is translated by fonctionner which is also the translation of to work Using several verbs to translate one only term reduces the frequencies of French verbs For this reason describing and teaching the most frequent verbs is not satisfactory Among the less frequent verbs in the references corpus are verbs that must be taught because they are especially difficult
7. productivity in the coining of new terms or new uses of already existing terms The technical documentation and terminology of most software packages or operating systems is first been written in English Translating the documentation into other languages raises the issue of the double competence users must have both linguistic and technical knowledge This problem is becoming more acute in the teaching of English as a second language Observation of real language usage can invalidate conventional and over simplifying hypotheses Let us consider the simple example of navigating on the Internet different terms are used in the various browsers to describe the same function of memorizing addresses URLs the French notion of signet matches bookmarks hotlist and favorites in Netscape and Internet Explorer respectively Students can easily acquire these uses but closely related uses can present some difficulties 1 You should bookmark this page now 2 You should favorite this page 3 Bookmark this page in your favorites Furthermore different translators will not always agree on the translation of a term or an expression one French translation for bookmark is marque page but the following has also been found 4 Bookmarquez cette page To allow students to find their way through this ever changing jargon it is necessary to teach CS English in a contrastive way by using authentic documents This permits c
8. the same type of explanations and French translations of the terms in the various bilingual dictionaries that can be found on the Web e Numerous specialised acronyms are found in dictionary entries Three types of acronyms can be found in bilingual dictionaries Acronyms that are translated into French such as SDN Integrated Service Digital Network translated in RNIS R seau Num rique IntInt gr de Service Acronyms of which only the expansion is used in French such as OS Operating System which is translated by syst me d exploitation but for which the French acronym SE is very rarely used except among purists Finally acronyms that do not have a translation in French such as SCSI Small Computer Interface System or MSDOS Microsoft Disk Operating System e Dictionaries also contain some very specialised modifiers such as controller less big or little endian 1 2 Difficulties of French Speakers We have noticed among French speaking learners several types of difficulties which are related to the verb system in English e Verb noun ambiguity nominal use of verbs and vice versa It can be difficult for students to distinguish a verb from a noun for a native speaker of English the context alone is enough to make the difference which is not the case for a non native speaker This is all the more difficult since French speakers often do not know how easily and frequently verbs can be created from nouns su
9. to type and to issue for the French lancer Using English verbs can thus rapidly become quite complex for a French speaker Comparing English and French verb concordances shall allow students to find out in which context these verbs can be used The French booter and amorcer are unequivocally translated by to boot booter being a nonce borrowing and amorcer a new use of the verb which has been especially created to give an official French equivalent to the English to boot Analysing the concordances reveals precise indications of when to use the translations d marrer and lancer or se lancer in some cases Generally and with very few exceptions to boot is used for d marrer and lancer when dealing with starting an operating system We show here what type of linguistic information can be extracted from the corpus This information will be used in the preparation of pedagogical material and for the automatic generation of exercises i To boot is an ergative verb i e the action can be described from the point of view of the agent or of the one that is affected by the action The basis structure of this verb has three arguments and the subject is the agent of the action No boots N Prep N with the following arguments Nhum or Nbootappl application software allowing the system to boot such as LILO Nbootobj all the objects that can be booted operating system disk bootdisk hard disk Nbootingobj booting objects e g
10. CD CD ROM D C A file emergency disk EN To boot one of your old kernels off the hard drive FR Pour lancer l un de vos vieux noyaux partir du disque dur EN A good idea might be to boot the notebook with a kernel FR Une bonne id e serait de d marrer le portable avec un noyau EN In order to have LILO boot Linux from OS 2 Boot Manager FR Afin que LILO lance Linux partir du gestionnaire de d marrage d OS 2 The corpus allows us immediately to detect the variety of English prepositions and how they are translated into French Analysing the sentences with a three argument structure enabled us also to build up a list of arguments for each position ii A simple transitive sub structure is possible No boots N Nhum Nbootappl EN LILO is a program that will allow you to boot Linux FR LILO est un programme vous permettant de lancer Linux iii The intransitive form in which the argument in the position of subject represents the element that is affected by the action is the following No boots with No Nbootobj EN When Linux boots it is usually configured not to produce FR Quand Linux se lance il n est habituellement pas configur pour iv A prepositional structure in which the object in the N first object position is assumed to have been deleted is also quite common No boots Prep Ni with No Nbootobj Prep to v EN Your BIOS may not allow you to boot directly to a SCSI drive
11. Teaching English Verbs With Bilingual Corpora Examples in the Computer Science Area Natalie Kiibler Pierre Yves Foucow Abstract In French universities most computer science syllabuses include compulsory teaching in English However English teachers are not necessarily experts in computing and textbooks or dictionaries are not complete and rapidly become obsolete especially with regards to verbs Yet it is precisely the English verb system which French speakers have trouble mastering particularly in technical areas We shall describe how using various types of corpora such as technical English corpora aligned English to French corpora and general English corpora has allowed us to achieve two objectives the discovery and description of the authentic use of technical verbs and the preparation of teaching material The resultant description will firstly help us to identify more appropriate pedagogic objectives for teaching a specialist s language it will then serve in a Web based language teaching environment to generate learning activities 0 Introduction In French universities English classes are very often included within specialised training because English is nowadays the mostly used language in the technical and scientific world English is particularly necessary in the computer science CS area because of the impressive and quick expansion of the domain At the linguistic level this is translated into a greater
12. a carte d clenche une interruption The distance between general use and specialised use is on a continuum between almost general and completely specialised Command terms that are used with an operating system like UNIX and Linux can be integrated into sentences as verbs with very specialised meanings The technical use of to quit for example is close to its general meaning i e to get out of a session In the e mail application running under UNIX or Linux quit is a command whose function is to leave the application without saving deleted messages the meaning of verbs and the name of commands merge together when the name of a command is integrated into a sentence as a verb In this case the use of the technical verb is very different from its general use To kill which means to suddenly stop a process is not as close to its general use although the French translation tuer can be found as well as d truire Finally the relation between general and specialised for to zip French compresser and to unzip French d compresser is very distant These verbs are quite numerous and some of them are also very frequent like to run for example To run has various uses and is a frequent verb in CS English according to our corpus evidence in our corpus of general newspaper The Times it is quite frequent as well cf 3 2 Frequencies but with other meanings However 1 The neologism fo gzip has been created on the basi
13. bble C 1998 Learner Corpus Data in the Foreign Language Classroom form focused instruction and data driven learning in Granger S ed Learner English and the Computer Longman London 14 Foucou P Y K bler N 1999 A Web based Environment for Teaching English General Architecture ReCall special issue Foucou P Y K bler N 2000 A Web based Environment for Teaching Specialised English in Lou Burnard and Tony McEnery eds Rethinking Language Pedagogy papers from the third international conference on language and teaching Peter Lang GmbH Frankfurt am Main Hoffman L 1985 Kommunikationsmittel Fachsprache G nter Narr Verlag T bingen Johns T 1988 Whence and Wither Classroom Concordancing in Bongaerts T et al eds Computer Applications in Language Learning 9 27 Foris Dordrecht K bler N 1995 L automatisation de la correction d erreurs syntaxiques application aux verbes de transfert en anglais pour francophones PhD thesis Universit de Paris 7 publications de l Institut Gaspard Monge Universit de Marne La Vall e Pearson J 1998 Terms in Context John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam Trimble R M T and Trimble L 1978 The Development of EFL Materials for Occupational English The Technical Manual In R M T Trimble L Trimble and K Drobnic eds English for Specific Purposes Science and Technology English Language
14. ch as to zip out of zip a program used to compress data or nouns from verbs such as a login based on the verb to log in Moreover some English verbs have no direct equivalent in French and are translated by paraphrases or support verbs and their predicate nouns collocations e Polysemy Some extremely polysemous English verbs can pose comprehension or structural problems for French speakers To run is a good example on one hand its various uses are variously translated into French on the other hand some of its structures are determined by the possible arguments of the verb e Structural differences between French and English Structure differences among very similar verbs in the two languages are often the cause of interference errors for French speakers K bler 1995 This is also the case in CS English The teaching of CS English cannot be achieved without a description of verbs and their structures Unfortunately it is exactly this type of description that is missing in textbooks It can however be extracted from corpora A thorough description of CS verbs appears to be necessary not only for teaching but also for other applications such as automatic error correction or automated translation systems 7 See footnote 4 http www2 echo lu edic EURODICAUTOM http web culture fr culture dglf internet http www rocq inria fr qui Philippe Deschamp CMTI glossaire html 2 Identifying problematic verbs 2 1 Specia
15. context is therefore extremely useful The French translation of the above example is 9 On peut charger la derni re version sur ftp et sous Mosaic depuis http In French the creation of neologisms such as fiper for example is subject to more constraints than in English French translators of such technical texts often have recourse to paraphrase based on the noun from which the English verb has been derived Describing structures in French and in English for the two verbs to ftp and to Mosaic for example means describing very different structures French uses charger une version sur ftp on ftp but sous Mosaic under Mosaic However examining all the occurrences of to FTP in the corpus suggested other possible translations 10 a You can ftp it from sunsite unc edu Vous pouvez obtenir par sunsite unc edu Working on bilingual corpora highlighted this diversity and showed that an English technical verb often has no stable translation in French that is why it is necessary to collect all possible equivalents As we were checking the English equivalents of the French expressions we also found an English paraphrase around the noun FTP 1 a It can be obtained by anonymous FTP from sunsite unc edu b On peut obtenir en faisant un FTP anonyme partir de When the rules of euphony allow it some creations coexist with periphrastic equivalents 12 a They must telnet to the firewall b Il faut se conn
16. e help The on line Merriam Webster s does not give any definition of to boot related to computer science the given meanings are to avail to profit There is no verb entry for to boot in the Collins Cobuild Among the on line dictionaries that are available on the Web Wordnet is a little more complete because there is a definition for the specialised use of this verb in computer science n 2 below However the information concerning the arguments of the verb or its syntactic structure is not sufficiently full 14 Boot kick give a boot to 15 boot cause to load an operating system and start the initial processes Another on line dictionary that is specialised in computer science FOLDOC tells us that to boot comes from to pull oneself up by one s own bootstraps the original meaning of this expression to do something without help has been transferred to a verb to bootstrap 16 Bootstrap From to pull oneself up by one s bootstrap To load and initialise the operating system on a computer Normally abbreviated to boot The original verb to boostrap is no longer used very often in CS English according to our corpus evidence only thirteen tokens out of which only two verbal uses can be found in the corpus 7 a This is useful to bootstrap Linux on a system with only one floppy drive b Ceci est utile pour d marrer Linux sur une machine qui ne poss de qu un lecteur de disquettes In France
17. ecter au firewall par le r seau 13 a Only the administrator can telnet directly to the firewall via Port 24 b Seul l administrateur peut t ln ter directement le firewall sur le port 24 Here fiper does not exist probably for euphony reasons The first translation represents an explanation of the telnet process the second one is quite surprising since from a prepositional verb in English Nhum telnet to Nmachine a transitive verb which is a loan translation is created As there is only one occurrence of the French verb f n ter in the corpus the acceptability of sentence 4F is questionable although all the rules concerning the coining of new words have been respected In this case combining frequency and structure can be useful to define the scope of the vocabulary to be taught a structure which is both rare and doubtful should be discarded One of the major problems concerning verbs in computer science is the lack of regularity in translating them from English into French and the divergences between norm and usage standardized terms by an official body such as the Commission Minist rielle de Terminologie Informatique are not always used while deprecated terms can be knowingly used because they are the ones that are used by the whole CS community The verb to boot which is quite frequent 700 token occurrences illustrates this issue Here again reference books such as dictionaries or textbooks are of littl
18. er problems with it The more they progress in computer science the less this type of terms poses problems because they have acquired the specific terms of their subject area The difficulties that are encountered be they on the level of comprehension or production relate primarily to the verbs as we noted among French speaking students whether they be beginners in English or more advanced In our project we are currently developing a description of the English CS verbs and their equivalents in French We have divided the verbs into three different categories which are quite similar to pragmatic approaches to the definition of terms Hoffman 1985 suggests that there are three categories of terms in a specialised vocabulary subject specific vocabulary non subject specific vocabulary and general vocabulary For Trimble and Trimble 1978 there are highly technical terms a bank of technical terms and sub technical terms While the first two categories are the same as the first two described by Hoffman the last one covers the terms coming from the general language but that have taken on a specific meaning in specialised subject areas As our aim is slightly different from describing terms for native speakers we chose an approach which takes into account the point of view of non native speakers i e a pedagogical point of view Examining the verbs we noticed that the highly technical verbs according to Hoffman s first category are very of
19. er science subject area with specialised uses that are very different from the general English meaning Comparing the candidates with their French equivalents but also with their general English uses allowed us to isolate the subject specific uses as shown in the examples below To save HOWTO Herald Tribune These settings will be saved for you to save court time Cette configuration sera sauvegard e he turned to the church to save his skin the government hopes to save hundreds of millions of dollars These example show that the arguments of the verbs are very different in CS English the French translation of to save in its specilized use is sauvegarder whereas in the three general uses given above the verb will be translated by gagner sauver and pargner respectively As was already shown in the case of neologisms comparing an English verb with its French equivalents allowed us to underscore uses that are unknown by French speakers The a priori meaning of to post in CS English is to send a message by e mail especially to a newsgroup which is confirmed by the French translation below 23 a Everybody should have a look through this section before posting for help b Tout le monde devrait y jeter un coup d ceil avant d envoyer un message demandant de l aide The meaning of the following example is completely different 24 a Called by the kernel when the card posts an interrupt b Appel par le noyau quand l
20. for French speakers Our concordancer allows us to query the corpus on character strings or with perl like regular expressions containing syntactical categories such as nouns verbs adjectives etc As shown in Figure 1 the perl like regular expression have has w ed looks for two sequences of words either have or has followed by a word ending in ed This search string defines occurrences of present perfect verb forms Occurrences Interface Netscape _ x Eichier Edition Affichage Aller Communicator 2 4 Signets amp Adresse 29b amp aRegexp 28have 7Chas 29 26V 2F 50w 2Bed amp Force 0 amp ConcordLength 408 amp aLimit 100 amp Dict amp Format 0_ 2 2 A at 2 s 3i Pr c dent Suiwant Recharger Accueil Rechercher Guide Imprimer S curit Arete Laboratoire de Linguistique Informatique Universit Paris XIII CNRS Recherche d expressions r guli res Perl remarques et suggestions bienvenues Tue Apr 27 12 42 25 1999 99 occurrence s de have has Qw ed Access HOWTO are some computer and math forms I have managed __ to get it to compile under Linux Access HOWTO 8 7 1 Compiling NFBtrans on LinuxI havereturned this patch to the maintainer of Access HOWTO of NFBtrans and he says that he has included it so if you get a version later than Access HOWTO some of the utilities do work and I have managed _to po
21. highlight differences especially in the first two types of verbs The difficulties that French speakers can have with verbs of the third type general English are common for all French speakers in general Basically we postulate that two main factors are responsible for the errors that French speakers make in English interference from the mothertongue and overgeneralization of rules in the second language K bler 1995 3 1 Verb noun ambiguity in the neologisms of CS English Neither the frequency list nor the list of terms tagged as verbs are enough to cover all the verbal neologisms that are created from technical or proper nouns The terms we are looking for are not necessarily tagged as verbs in our working dictionary Reference books are of little benefit either In textbooks for teaching CS English these verbs are never clearly explained English dictionaries of computing or bilingual glossaries of computing be they hard copy dictionaries or on line glossaries that can be found on the Web contain many nouns but do not mention verbal uses For example although the Dictionary of Computing published by Oxford University Press We use a specific dictionary to tag our corpous e g a list of words with part of speech categories Information extracted from our corpora allowed us to complete our dictionary and aimed at learners of English as a second language is very complete it does not offer any information of this type Wi
22. ication the customer could ever conceive of running may not run on Linux by using the native applications the iBCS2 applications the DOSEMU applications and applications that run WABI a nice suite of applications could be built to solve their needs 5 While it is true that every application the customer could ever conceive of running may not run on Linux by using the native applications the i1BCS2 applications the DOSEMU applications and applications that run WABI a nice suite of applications could be built to solve their needs 6 VirtuFlex runs standard Unix workstations with 8 MB of RAM minimum 16 MB recommended z S Document charg aR The more precise the linguistic description is the more sophisticated the exercises can be Moreover combining a linguistic description with a corpus based French speakers errors see Cornu et al 1993 will lead to the automatic correction of less restricted exercises than gap filling exercises which need precise grammar checking References Bosworth Gerome S Ingrand C Marret R 1992 Comprendre l anglais scientifique et technique Ellipse Paris Brookes M Lagoutte F 1993 English for the Computer World Belin Paris Cornu E K bler N Bodmer F Grosjean F Grosjean L Lewy N Tschichold C Tschumi C 1997 Prototype of a Second Language Writing Tool for French Speakers Writing in English Natural Language Engineering 2 3 Granger S Tri
23. imilaires comme le courrier electronique Bien qu il n agisse que comme un simple lecteur de texte similaire a celui d IBM pour le PC quand il controle des programmes qu il ne comprend pas avec ceux qu il comprend il peut fournir des controles bien plus sophistiques Voyez la section Emacspeak pour plus d informations sur emacspeak S Document charg b 9P 2 Figure 2 Aligned paragraphs for announce After examining concordances to discriminate between the different uses of each verb we looked for the possible French translations for each use in the French translated corpus Our aim consisted on one hand in refining the description of English verbs and on the other hand in matching the different French equivalents We did the same with the French corpus analysis of the different uses and searching for the English equivalents 3 Illustration with a few verbs We show here how querying corpora can reveal the diversity and variety of uses of verbs in CS English Working on corpora allowed us to describe three types of verbs that are typical in English neologisms specialised uses of verbs that already exist in general English and general English verbs that are extremely frequent in CS English The results of corpus query can also reveal the potential difficulties that French speakers have Comparing CS English verbs with their French equivalents but also with verbs in general English allowed us to
24. just runs a command b Il ne fait qu ex cuter une commande 28 a 32 bit code that runs in 16 bit mode b du code 32 bits qui s ex cute en mode 16 bits ii to run faire tourner tourner fonctionner 29 a You can run Linux on any Alpha based machine b Vous pouvez faire tourner Linux sur n importe quelle machine Alpha 30 a The ability of any Alpha based machine to run Linux patient in subject position active voice b La possibilit de faire tourner Linux sur une machine Alpha operator faire gt introduction of a third argument in the subject position GI a If the same program is run on a 21064 passive voice patient in subject position b Si le m me programme tourne sur un 21064 active patient in subject position The choice of the preposition on and under depends on the arguments in the subject and object positions application software and operating systems run on a machine or an operating system while application software runs under an operating system 32 a VirtuFlex runs on standard UNIX Workstations b VirtuFlex tourne sur des stations UNIX standard 33 a ANSFORTH system that runs under Win3 2 Win95 WinNT b Le syst me ANSFORTH qui tourne sous Win3 2 Win95 WinNT These examples show how corpus analysis can highlight the great variety of existing structures and arguments as well as the relationship between structures and transformations Extracting the left and right context
25. led In the Herald Tribune in contrast occurrences of install have been found in structures in which a human argument is in the position of direct object 37 the country s new president who was installed in January He was Technical uses of install occur much less frequently in general English 38 by having a catalytic converter installed in her old fashioned Volkswagen Derby Noun uses can be different in technical and general English in general English the noun is installation while in CS English the mostly used noun is install Verb noun ambiguity can thus be more difficult to resolve in CS English Another problem related to verb noun ambiguity lies in the structural differences between a verb and a noun in French and English Access is an example of this difficulty In English the noun is followed by the preposition to the French noun acc s is followed by the preposition a Access however is also a transitive verb in English whilst the French verb is followed by a preposition acc der a 39 a Postgress95 which provides simple access to any existing database b Postgress95 qui fournit un acc s n importe quelle base de donn es existante 40 a The user can access the system b L utilisateur peut acc der au syst me gt The user can access to the system Adding a preposition after to access is a very common mistake among French speakers This shows how useful it can be to look for general Engli
26. lised general and parallel corpora The fast development of the World Wide Web opens up access to ever expanding ressources in terms of corpora Using technical documentation which is exclusively related to the real world has the advantage of introducing an authentic component its importance has been highlighted for years in the literature on this subject T Johns 1988 In order to describe the reality of CS English we chose as a working corpus the Linux HOWTOs half a million words The HOWTOs represent an easy to access and regularly updated technical documentation that has the advantadge of being multilingual They have been translated into several languages including into French In order to be thorough we sampled other corpora Texts relating to computer science offer a wide variety of styles and levels of language We chose to use a representative sample of different possible styles Our corpora have been extracted from the almost inexhaustible ressources offered by the World Wide Web and divided into five categories i Technical Documentation user s manual of the UNIX operating system 250 documents 16 MB 53300 types the Internet RFCs which are the instructions for use of the Jnternet 2000 files 85 MB 161083 types ii Specialised On line Press Wired computer science magazine 1000 articles 5MB 38392 types iii Newsgroups_ Newsgroups deal with various aspects of computing the level of language is quite casual
27. lish verbs and their equivalents in French are frequently described as lists that are unfortunately not always complete and do not contain information about the different contexts of use leaving the user to guess which translation must be used in which context This is not surprising as computer science is producing new concepts almost everyday especially with the development of the Internet General dictionaries are genrally sparing in their inclusion of CS terms which is not their primary function as they are not specialised dictionaries and specialised dictionaries are often incomplete for non native speakers or become very quickly obsolete The information provided by these two types of dictionaries is not very useful given the real nature of texts This explains why it is necessary to resort to more current reference sources We agree with Pearson 1998 for whom the context is the only way of making the difference between a term and a word This means here that we shall use corpora to decide whether a verb should be described or not CS dictionaries focus on nouns and their meanings as well as their possible translations in French in bilingual glossaries Beginners and French speaking students in computer science such as French university students in the first two years will find definitions which are sometimes encyclopedic in FOLDOC Free On Line Dictionary Of Computing or in other CS dictionaries Students are faced with
28. looked in textbooks or specialised dictionaries We shall show how available corpora on the Internet can be used to present the students with varied examples in contexts that are simple yet encompass all possible structures The contrastive analysis of bi or multi lingual technical documentation can lead to support a description of the same uses in different languages Using authentic and constantly updated documents introduces a reality component in the description of usage we aim at describing the verbs that are actually used by a scientific community rather than the description of terms that have been standardized by an official body We use the conventional corpus query tools that have been developed at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Informatique of the University of Paris 13 These tools have been adapted to the specific needs of language teaching simple and bilingual concordances the automated creation of learning activities and so on 1 Verbs and Corpora A pedagogical choice Confronting French speakers with CS English can cause them some problems in comprehension and production Very few verbs are presented in technical dictionary entries they are often be introduced at the end of a noun entry without any other information than the part of speech POS category It is however these that pose the main problems Once non native speakers have acquired a technical term be it simple multi word nouns or adjectives they seldom have furth
29. of verbs enabled us to obtain a list of possible arguments which had to be checked with an expert in computer science How can the layman know that LILO is a boot program that inetd is the noun of a program or that Pentium which is the name of the microprocessor is a metonymy for computer The comparison with uses in general English can help isolate technical verbs The uses described above cannot be found in general English on the contrary it is possible to find structures that never appear in CS English 34 become a presidential concern about running for re election in 1996 35 stamps old coins and odd documents run around the square Caf s and 3 3 General English verbs 8 FOLDOC A Glossary of Computing Terms Dictionary of Computing For Learners of English 12 Teaching CS English verbs cannot concentrate solely on highly subject specific or specialised verbs Some general verbs are quite often used in CS English Comparing general corpus with specialised corpus for non specialized verbs showed up differences in the frequency for different uses While a general verb has several general uses only one can be found in CS English To install is more frequent in CS English than in our general corpus in the computing field it is used in only one type of context 36 You must configure and install an appropriate kernel and then install the AX 25 In the computing context it is only programs which can be instal
30. omputer scientists whatever their technical competence to feel at ease in English as well as in French French translations lead beginners in computer science to a better understanding of technical documentation More advanced computer scientists should be able to deal with the French terms whilst they are already used to working with the English terms That is why translators often give the English term at the beginning of a translated document and subsequently use the French equivalent throughout Thus terms like chipset for ensemble de composants spool for queue or file d attente or even spreadsheet for tableur can usefully be given at the beginning of a French document because they are already known to French speakers In the present article we describe the pedagogical experiences that Universit de Paris 7 kubler ccr jussieu fr Universit de Paris 13 foucou lli univ paris13 fr gt We would like to thank A J Renouf for her very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article 4 URL Uniform Resource Locator from the Free On Line Dictionary of Computing http www foldoc org 5 We found around 100 occurrences of this form on Altavista took place at the Technology Institute of Villetaneuse at the University of Paris 13 We shall develop one of the most problematic issues for French speaking learners mastering CS English verbs This point is particularly crucial all the more so since it has often been over
31. rt most of the rest so this Access HOWTO which detects when the pointer mouse has moved to the edge of the screen and makes a Access HOWTO Systems Inc displays Because they have provided _ programming information to the Access HOWTO blinux and linux access mailing lists have contributed to this document by providng Access HOWTO Doyon A number of other people have contributed comments and information Specific Alpha HOWTO required to build a motherboard has increased due to higher speed clocks and the Alpha HOWTO regulations the emphasis has shifted towards providing motherboards that are Alpha HOWTO manufacture Digital s system groups have produced several generations of machines using Alpha HOWTO 2 serial ports and a parallel port It has limited expansion capability one PCI slot due Assembly HOWTO over the HOWTO All the people who have contributed ideas remarks and moral support lt AR x Document charg z ee Figure 1 Present perfect occurrences A first query searching for all the terms that can be considered as verbs provided us with a more precise list than just the frequency list This query is important because of the great differences existing between French and English We picked out verbs like to mirror or to cache which are not frequent in the corpus less than a hundred occurrences each but which can cause difficulties since there are no verbal equivalents in French Miroirer or cacher are not good candidates
32. s of to zip 11 very few indications about its specialised uses can be found in reference books Computing dictionaries do not mention it Among the thirty or so uses given by the Merriam Webster s only one is related to computing to run a problem through a computer a use that is quite rare in CS English This use can be found in the Collins Cobuild but along with another one You don t need a degree in mathematics to run operate a computer A quick check in the HOWTOs and RFCs corpora gives the following result there are only four occurrences of run something through in the HOWTOs and none in the RFCs Moreover the arguments of to run do not match with the ones found in the dictionaries 25 a Dictionaries To run a problem through a computer b Corpus If you run your file through TeX program Scanning bilingual dictionaries gave us the following translations ex cuter passer fonctionner tre en marche and utiliser We then analyzed the occurrences of to run in the corpus This showed us that the above translations are not the only ones in use and gave us complete information about the phraseology of the different uses We give here a few examples of the two basic uses of to run and the various translations that can be found in our corpus i to run lancer ex cuter 26 a You forgot to run LILO or system doesn t boot at all b Vous avez oubli de lancer LILO ou le syst me ne boote plus du tout 27 a It
33. sh verbs in specialised corpora 4 Conclusion Developing a linguistic description is not an easy task in a highly technical subject area The linguist cannot rely on intuition because s he does not have the necessary technical knowledge information found in reference books is of little help Using and relying on authentic documents is therefore absolutely necessary contrastive work on bilingual corpora allowed us to list the characteritics of technical verbs It has also enable us to identify differences in the use of specific structures between French and English The observation of the English equivalents of the French verbs threw new light on the relationships between the different uses of a verb in English The current linguistic description needs to be refined the description of the structures is not coupled with systematic statistic information Concerning the teaching of CS English compiling a learner s corpus should help us complete our teaching objectives A corpus driven description of learner s English would lead to the description of linguistic reality As stated in Granger and Tribble 1998 compiling and analysing a corpus of the non native learner allow the linguist to highlight the learner s difficulties and therefore to decide what must be taught Working on corpora permitted us to achieve two aims on the one hand to show students the different verb structures from contrastive concordance samples and then to allow them
34. ten neologisms which have to be acquired as such The second category of verbs partly matches the first and second categories of Hoffman and Trimble and Trimble since it consists of verbs that already exist in general English but that have acquired a specialised use The last group corresponds to both the third category of Hofman and of Trimble and Trimble it consists of general English verbs that are used in CS English particularly those that are extremely frequent and that are difficult to master for French speakers in this subject area Our approach has potential for the creation of pedagogical material allowing teachers to present students directly with authentic data as well as to automatically generate learning activities such as drills for example We have indeed a Web assisted language learning WALL environment Foucou amp K bler 2000 which generates learning activities allowing students to practice acquired knowledge 1 1 Existing pedagogical material dictionaries textbooks online offline A great number of textbooks offer descriptions of the specific characteristics of CS English but these often remain basic The verb noun ambiguity which is typical in technical English and the great versatility in the creation of new terms are rarely mentioned Very few indications are given about the sentence i e the verbs structures and their distributional and transformational properties As far as translations are concerned CS Eng
35. th this in mind we looked for inflected forms of verbs i e words ending in ed ing and e s This type of verb is regular because the simple past and past participle are built by simply adding ed to the root An even finer selection can be made by searching the concordances for more complex verb forms such as have been or being followed by a word ending in ed for instance Verbs such as to ftp to rlogin to telnet to gzip to Mosaic were extracted in this way The verb fo zip is derived from the nous zip hence the inflected forms zips zipping zipped In this case the relationship between verb and noun is clear as is the syntactic structure of the verb 6 You can zip the file and attach it to your message The term in use in French is as simple as in English 7 Vous pouvez zipper le fichier et le joindre votre message For other verbs the relationship can be more opaque to FTP is derived from the acronym FTP File Transfer Protocol to Mosaic stems from Mosaic which is the name of the first browser of the World Wide Web 8 The latest source can be FTPed from the directory ftp or Mosaiced from http In this case the English context alone is not enough to establish the basis syntactic structure of the verbs Their meaning remains unclear to a layman French speakers can have comprehension problems and may even misinterpret the sentence The possibility we have of verifying the French equivalent in exactly the same
36. to look for equivalences in the parallel 1 We frequently noticed it among undergraduate students corpora on the other hand it enabled us to make a description of the verbs focusing on differences and on potential problems The description was then used to generate exercises automatically Gap filling exercises can be produced on concordances It is possible to ask students to find the correct preposition after to run for example PEcriinexorcises Netscape E Fichier Edition Affichage Aller Communicator 2 3 a Signets Aller i http wall univ paris1 34r L a at 2 S a Precedent Suwant Recharger Accueil Rechercher Guide Imprimer S curit Arreter Laboratoire de Linguistique Informatique Universit Paris XIIIT CNRS Fill in the blanks with the correct terms Missing terms on 4 under 4 1 Well after all there is Cygnus Solutions has developped the cygwin32 dll library for GNU programs to run OR MacroShit platforms 2 Qddb Description Qddb is fast powerful and flexible database software that runs UGE Lr Unix 3 LD_TRACE LOADED _ OBJECTS applies to ELF only and causes programs to think they re being run ldd LD_ TRACE LOADED OBJECTS true usr bin lynx libneurses so 1 gt usr lib libncurses so 1 9 6 libe so 5 gt lib libe so 5 2 18 A graphical user interface that runs X11 can be invoked using make xconfig 4 While it is true that every appl
37. ven language A RE Fichier Edition Affichage Aller Communicator 2 7 3 Signets Aller fhip wall univ paris13 fr dyn b42 HOWTO en b 0 p21 X 2 a at 2 fe sb Pr c dent Suivant Recharger Accueil Rechercher Guide Imprimer S curit SPECT SYN CMESIS ET SCARE CEMA LLY noori tear ana vonvert re Nto a actual spoken output It is possible to have these implemented as either hardware or software Unfortunately the free Linux speech synthesisers are reportedly not good enough to use as a sole means of output Hardware speech synthesisers are the alternative The main one that I know of that works is DECtalk from Digital driven by emacspeak However at this time March 1997 a driver for the Doubletalk synthesiser has been Gimenes Using emacspeak full access to all of the facilities of Linux is fairly easy This includes the normal use of the shell a world wide web browser and many other similar features such as email Although it only acts as a plain text reader similar to IBM s one for the PC when controling programs it x que je connaisse qui fonctionne est DECtalk de Digital pilote par emacspeak Cependant a ce jour mars 1997 un pilote pour le synthetiseur Doubletalk a ete EMM Utiliser l acces complet de emacspeak pour l ensemble des possibilites de Linux est assez facile Ceci comprend l utilisation normale du shell d un navigateur World Wide Web et de beaucoup d autres possibilites s
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