The lexical profile of Swedish 31
(2) Eva gick/sprang haltande in i huset
Eva went/ran limping into the house
One reason manner of motion is seldom indicated with a present participle together
with one of the motion verbs that is marked for manner is that the combination
would be contradictory (*gå simmande/ridande... ‘walk swimming/riding...’).
Only gå ‘walk’ has a large number of hyponyms (troponyms). Manner of motion
verbs can in principle be combined freely with other types of present participles,
even if most combinations appear to be infrequent (simma omkring sjungande
‘swim around singing’, krypa omkring svärande ‘creep around swearing’).
This paper will present a corpus-based contrastive study of the Swedish gen-
eral vehicle verbs and their closest correspondents in a number of genetically and/
or areally related European languages. Section 3 gives a brief description of the
corpus. As a background, Section 4 will present the closest correspondents of
Swedish gå, which in many languages has two major correspondents like English
go/walk. Then, one section is devoted to each one of the three general vehicle verbs
åka, fara and köra in Swedish (Sections 5–7). The inventories of vehicle verbs are
summed up and discussed in Section 8. Section 9 will treat the Finnish verb lähteä,
which is a frequent translation of Swedish åka in spite of the fact that there is a
semantically more direct equivalent in Finnish (ajaa).
- The Multilingual Parallel Corpus
The term parallel corpus has received different interpretations but will be used
here with reference to corpora which contain originals and their translations in
distinction to the term comparable corpus wich refers to corpora which contain
texts in two or more languages which have been selected in such a way that the
texts are as similar as possible with respect to register, time of publication and
other relevant features.
Data will be taken from the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (MPC), which is
being compiled by the author and at present consists of extracts from 21 Swedish
novels and their published translations into English, German, French and Finnish.
The source texts are indicated by a text code based on the author’s name. (See
Appendix 1 for a list of the Swedish originals and the text codes.) The number
of words is around 550,000 in the Swedish originals. In addition, there are trans-
lations of a limited number of the texts into Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and
Dutch and some other languages which will not be referred to in this paper. There
is also a Finnish-Swedish corpus consisting of extracts from 13 Finnish novels and
their translations into Swedish and a few original texts in other languages with
translations into Swedish.