Task 1, Week 2

Take the following simplified version of the first few lines of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and translate them into a language of your choice.

A single rich man must want a wife. "My dear Mr. Bennet," said his wife to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is sold?" Mr. Bennet replied that he had not. "But it is," she said; "Mrs. Long has just been there and she told me about it." Mr. Bennet gave no answer. "Do you not want to know who has taken it?" asked his wife.

Take the translation and:

• For each clause (not sentence, but clause), identify the main verb.
• Identify any modals and think about how you could tell somebody else to recognize them. If your language expresses modality through morphology, identify the morpheme that is responsible.
• Identify any auxiliaries and determine what type of auxiliary they are (tense, aspectual, passive).
• If you have translated well, you will probably have some extra bits in the verbal complex that you cannot determine as yet. These are probably light verbs and we can discuss them together.
• Be prepared to share your translated text with me and the class. That is, you need to gloss (say what the words are and what morphology they contain) the sentences --- this is a form of POS-tagging, so is something that will need to be done for your language anyway at some point. It would also be great if you can transliterate the text.