The lexical profile of Swedish 29
The nuclear verbs komma ‘come’ and gå ‘go’ cover together more than 25% of the
total number of motion verb tokens in the corpus. Semantically, come and go are
commonly referred to as deictic verbs, since their interpretation is anchored in the
speech situation in their most basic use. The prototypical meaning of come can be
characterized: ‘move to the place of the speaker at the time of speaking’. As is well
known, languages vary with respect to how far the verb ‘come’ can be extended
from this ideal (see Gathercole 1977 and Wilkins & Hill 1995, who question the
basicness of ‘come’ as a universal category).
One way of describing the contrast is to say that come is Goal-oriented,
whereas go is Source-oriented (Fillmore 1977). This feature is shared by a larger
class of verbs, the verbs of Arrival and Departure, which focus the reaching of a
Goal or the leaving of a place serving as Source. Typically, the focused place can
be left implicit: Peter arrived. Peter left. If a specific point of time is specified, it
refers to the time of arrival at or departure from the focused place, even if some
other place is explicitly mentioned. In Peter arrived from Paris at five o’clock, Peter
is in some other place than Paris at five o’clock, and in Peter left for London at five
o’clock, Peter is not in London at five o’clock, but in some place that can be inferred
from the situation. Come and go are also Goal-oriented vs. Source-oriented, but
are deictically anchored in the speech situation. As shown in Viberg (2003), the
meaning of Swedish komma can be considerably extended from the prototype, but
is always Goal- or End-point-oriented. The most frequent English translation is
come but arrive also reaches a notable frequency as a translation. When Swedish
is translated into French, arriver approaches the frequency of venir ‘come’ as a
translation (when komma refers to human locomotion). In the opposite direction,
komma is the most frequent translation of English arrive, often in combination
with the particle fram: komma fram.
Bodily locomotion refers to verbs where a human being (or an animal) moves
using its own body, whereas Vehicle refers to displacement accomplished with
a vehicle. Both these types of verbs can be further divided with reference to the
medium: Ground, Water and Air. Bodily locomotion verbs refer to the major body
part that is used and the way of moving it. Movement on foot is the major type
of self-movement for human beings. There is a major contrast between walking,
which can be defined as moving on foot always touching ground (ATG), and run-
ning, which does not have this restriction. Both of these verbs have numerous
troponyms in Swedish as in English. Directional verbs, verbs which incorporate
a direction, do exist in Swedish in spite of the fact that it is a satellite-framed lan-
guage, but such verbs have a much more restricted use in Swedish than in a typical
verb-framed language. Motion Up can be expressed with stiga in Swedish, but in
this meaning it primarily refers to non-human subjects: Ballongen/Solen stiger
‘The balloon/The sun is rising’. With human subjects, it primarily refers to special