Seeing the lexical profile of Swedish
through multilingual corpora
The case of Swedish åka and other vehicle verbs
Åke Viberg
Uppsala University
The typological distinction between verb-framed and satellite-framed lan-
guages is informative but is today regarded rather as a continuum and needs
to be supplemented with more fine-grained distinctions. This paper presents a
corpus-based contrastive study of Swedish verbs describing motion in a vehicle
and their correspondents in a multilingual parallel corpus consisting of Swedish
original texts and their translations into English, German, French and Finnish.
In Swedish, there is in principle an obligatory contrast between motion on foot
and motion in a vehicle when the subject is human. The Swedish verb gå can
only be used with reference to bodily locomotion on foot, whereas another
verb, primarily åka, must be used to refer to motion in a vehicle (e.g. åka bil ‘go
by car’, åka tåg ‘go by train’). There is also a contrast between åka which refers
to traveling in a vehicle as a passenger and köra which refers to traveling in a
vehicle as a driver and operating the vehicle. Languages differ with respect to
the inventory of vehicle verbs, the degree to which a certain contrast is obliga-
tory and the semantic extension of individual verbs. In addition, a number of
more far-reaching usage-based differences are identified showing that languages
tend to favour certain perspectives or alternative ways of coding a certain type
of situation, which means – in principle – that verbs with different meanings
can be favoured in two languages even in cases where close semantic equiva-
lents exist.
Keywords: lexical semantics, motion verbs, corpus-based contrastive study,
lexical typology, Germanic languages, Finnish