1. Introduction
The topicality of the theme is determined by the necessity of the formalized description of syntactic structures, namely prepositional syntactic structures of the modern English language, for further use of the received formal models in the programs of automatic language processing.
The research object are the syntactic structures of the English sentence with prepositional links.
The research subject is the analysis of the structural and functional characteristics as well as the components set of the syntactic structures with prepositional links of the modern English language.
The aim is to study phrases, which include the three most frequently used prepositions in English, namely of, in, and to.
The research tasks include the following:
- to find all possible models of prepositional links as well as to describe and analyze them;
- to create a comprehensive database of all links of the given prepositions;
- to determine the frequency of structural models of prepositional links, which would be used in creating the algorithmic rules.
The modern English language has no developed case system in its nominal parts of speech and that is why the prepositions are very important for the sentence structure. When generalized, the function of prepositions is defined as expressing the relations between words in a sentence. However, we would like to go deeper into the subject of the syntactical functions of prepositions.
On the sentence level: a preposition is never a member of the sentence by itself; it is a component of the member of the sentence whose main center is the subsequent noun, pronoun, or gerund. The prepositions do not connect members of a sentence, but they are situated within these parts.
Prepositions are considered within the syntactic structure of the sentence, thus it is necessary to build models, which would be suitable for automatic syntactic analysis, which is carried out according to parts of speech and members of the sentence. This way of analysis is the most widespread for the systems that are practically in use.
In the given research the following methods have been used: the descriptive method for singling out the units for analysis; distributional analysis for the text segmentation, this is an important step for unit identification, that is, distributing the units into classes and defining the relations among the latter; and the modeling method for creating formal models. The elements of quantitative analysis were used to determine the frequency of the researched models.
Depending on the aspect of reproduction, models are divided into functional, structural and mixed. Structural models show the structure of the modeled object, i.e. its important elements within the system of their relations. Functional models represent the objects behavior, and mixed models include both. Prepositional phrases are considered to be structural models.
The created algorithm of finding such prepositional links in the text is vied as a part of automated/automatic language processing modules and may be used for machine translation modules or for educational purposes, e.g. in CALL developments.
The software applied in the practical part of the diploma paper is Borland Delphi. Borland Delphi is an object-oriented, visual programming environment to develop 32-bit applications for deployment on Windows and Linux. Using Delphi, it is possible to create highly efficient applications with a minimum of manual coding.
Delphi provides a suite of Rapid Application Development (RAD) design tools, including programming wizards and application and form templates, and supports object-oriented programming with a comprehensive class library.
Thus the given work will be of some theoretical value for the scientific research of prepositional word-combinations peculiarities and of definite practical value for the automatic translation of such word-combinations and for the application in CALL programs.
Some issues of the theme of the given diploma paper were discussed and considered to be topical during the following presentations:
Ø Modeling the Syntactic Structure of Prepositional Word-Combinations in the English Language at the International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technologies: CSIT 2006;
Ø Modeling of Prepositional Links in the Syntactic Structure of the English Sentence at the First International Conference of Young Scientists Computer Science and Engineering 2006[1];
Ø Peculiarities of Prepositional Word-Combinations Researched by Object-Oriented Programming at the 64-th Scientific-technical students conference at Lviv Polytechnic National University.
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R.D. Karamyshva Modeling of Prepositional Links in the Syntactic Structure of the English Sentence // : 1- ̳ CSE-2006. : " ", 2006. C. 136-137.
