Genitive constructions in English to Swahili machine translation

Abstract

English has two methods of constructing genitive expressions. In one method, the suffix s is added to the end of the possessor, and the subject of posession, together with its arguments, is located after the possessor. In another method, the possession preposition of is used, whereby the possessor comes after the subject of possession and its arguments. The basic rule is that the first method is used when the possessor is a human being. Newertheless, this rule is profusely broken. Swahili uses only the latter type of geninitive constructions, and all English constructions must be converted into this format. This report discusses the methods of doing this.