THE RUSSIAN INFINITIVE IN PREDICATE AND ATTRIBUTE FUNCTIONS, AND WAYS OF THEIR EXPRESSION IN THE PERSIAN LANGUAGE: USING ONLINE RESOURCES AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Abstract

The syncretism of the infinitive, consisting of its ability to perform diverse syntactic functions in a sentence, is a common feature of both Russian and Persian. This paper presents a scientific understanding of the means of expressing the syntactic functions of the infinitive in the two languages. A comparative analysis has been conducted, based on methods of automated and traditional syntactic parsing. Approximately 120 examples of infinitive usage in F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot” and their translational correspondences in Persian, as performed by M. Akhi and S. Habibi, have been examined. The presented material allows to conclude that the Russian infinitive in the role of a predicate is most often translated into Persian using a personal form of the verb, and its main syntactic role is generally preserved in the Persian translation. Differences most often concern the structure of the predicate: a compound predicate in Russian may be rendered as a simple predicate in Persian, and vice versa. In contrast, when translating a Russian infinitive in the function of an attribute, its syntactic role is not preserved, but rather transformed, for example, into an indirect object.