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Abstract Viberg

The lexical typological profile of Swedish with particular reference to grammtical(ized) verbs

The typological profile of a language is an account of the distinctive character of its structure in relation to other languages based primarily on work in general typology but also on genetic and areal linguistics and on contrastive analysis and other types of crosslinguistic studies (Viberg 2006a). The presentation will be concerned with Swedish and its lexical structure, i. e. the lexical typological profile of Swedish (Viberg 2006b). The characterization will proceed from general typology with a world-wide scope (presented briefly) to a corpus-based contrastively oriented comparison between Swedish and a selection of genetically and/or areally relatively closely related languages. With respect to lexical structure, the characterization will proceed from aspects of the global structure of the lexicon, to lexical semantic fields and to basic words within fields. Special attention is paid to patterns of polysemy. Data will be taken from two translation corpora, the large English Swedish Parallel Corpus and a Multilingual Pilot Corpus consisting of extracts from Swedish novels and their published translations into English, German, French and Finnish.

Earlier studies have been concerned with “concrete verbs” such as verbs of motion and possession (Viberg 2006b) and mental verbs (Viberg 2005). A short summary will be given of these earlier studies and then a short overview will be given of Swedish grammatical verbs and a more detailed characterization of the verbs which have as one of their functions to serve as analytical causatives and their patterns of polysemy. The major examples are få (‘get’; ‘may’, ‘have to’; direct causation), låta (‘sound’; ‘let’/indirect causation), göra (‘make/do’)and se (till att) ‘’see’; see to it that’/’make sure’ (perception; monitoring causative).

 

References

Viberg, Å. 2005. The lexical typological profile of Swedish mental verbs. Languages in Contrast 5:1, 121-157.

--- 2006a. The typological profile of Swedish – an introduction. In: Viberg, Å. Guest editor. The Typological Profile of Swedish. Thematic issue of Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung. Vol.59:1, 3-11.

--- 2006b. Towards a lexical profile of the Swedish verb lexicon. In: Viberg, Å. (guest ed. As above.), pp. 103-129.