Give and Take: A contrastive study of light verb constructions in English, German and Swedish
2015 (English)In: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Verb Constructions / [ed] Signe Oksefjell Ebeling, Hilde Hasselgård, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, p. 144-168Chapter in book (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
This paper investigates light verb constructions (LVCs) with give/geben/ge and take/nehmen/ta in English, German and Swedish in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus and the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The results indicate that LVCs express aspectual distinctions (which is often done through quantification) and carry (mostly adjective) modifications. English prefers LVCs with zero-derived nouns, German mostly uses suffixed nouns and Swedish mainly nouns without equivalent verbs. Swedish translations from and into English are affected by the types of LVCs translated while German translations are less so. In general, LVCs with give/geben/ge are more similar cross-linguistically than those with take/nehmen/ta because the former are often based on the double-object construction.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. p. 144-168
National Category
General Language Studies and Linguistics
Research subject
Humanities, Linguistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-46768Libris ID: 18381874ISBN: 1-4438-7808-1 (print)ISBN: 978-1-4438-7808-1 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-46768DiVA, id: diva2:861431
Note
About the book
This volume sheds new light on verb constructions by exposing them to cross-linguistic analysis based on multilingual corpora. It is composed of nine studies which provide insights into various aspects of cross-linguistic diversity, including showing that seemingly equivalent verb constructions may differ in their semantics, and that similar meanings may be expressed by different types of constructions. In other words, this book shows that different languages have different ways of lexicalising verb-based meanings, most notably by means of other, divergent verb constructions.
A range of lexicogrammatical aspects of verb constructions are explored throughout the book, including time reference; modality; voice; light verb constructions; non-finite complementation of lexical verbs; posture-verb constructions; semiperiphrastic constructions; and the construction and semantic composition of verbs of putting. All of the contributions consider English in comparison with at least one of the following languages: Czech, German, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.
As such, this volume offers a truly multilingual perspective on verb constructions. The diversity of comparisons also highlights the multi-faceted nature of the verb phrase, which seems to have virtually limitless potential for exploration in the fields of tense, aspect, modality, lexical semantics, syntax, and phraseology.
2015-10-162015-10-162018-05-18Bibliographically approved