Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics - Studies in honour of Stig Johansson

30 Åke Viberg

types of motion on foot stiga upp/ner/fram ‘step up/down/forward’ or to abstract

motion stiga i graderna ‘rise in the ranks’. Motion Down can be expressed with a

number of verbs but these all refer to uncontrolled motion down, as do the most

frequent ones falla ‘fall’ and sjunka ‘sink’. There are also a number of more special

verbs which refer to direction or the path of motion in some way such as vända

‘turn’, återvända ‘return’ and följa ‘follow’.

2.3 The centrality of vehicle verbs in Swedish

Certain differences between Swedish and other European languages that have

been traditionally taught at school in Sweden have been ‘common’ knowledge for

a long time. Teachers of English often point out at an early stage that English can

use go both to express Swedish gå (till fots) ‘go by foot’ and åka bil/tåg ‘go by car/

train (and other vehicles)’ and that German can use fahren to express both åka bil

(etc.) ‘go by car’ and köra bil ‘drive (a) car’. Such contrasts are in principle obliga-

tory in Swedish. This is shown schematically in Table 1.

Table 1. The centrality of manner in Swedish

Language Toward Origo

−Manner +Manner

Travel on foot Travel in a Vehicle

ATG As a Passenger As a Driver ...

Swedish komma gå åka köra ...

English come go drive ...

German kommen gehen fahren

The verb komma and the other verbs of arrival and disappearance are unmarked

for manner and critically refer to a focused place (symbolized as Origo) which

tends to be left implicit. Most of the directional verbs are also unmarked for man-

ner, but apart from that most Swedish motion verbs indicate some variety of man-

ner. In sentences with komma, manner can optionally be indicated by adding the

present participle of a manner of motion verb as in (1). Such combinations are

moderately frequent in texts. Combinations of this type are sometimes possible

even with verbs that already indicate manner of motion (see 2) but such combina-

tions are clearly infrequent.

(1) Eva kom gående/springande/åkande i en Volvo...

Eva came walking/running/riding in a Volvo...