38 Åke Viberg
exists in all the Germanic languages. French uses a departure verb. In Finnish, the
dominant translation of åka, lähteä, is used, in spite of the fact that Finnish has
a closer correspondent to åka in ajaa (see Section 9, which is devoted to lähteä).5.3 The meaning potential of åkaThe meaning potential is a representation of the total range of meanings of a
word and their relationships. So far, only the use of åka as a vehicle verb has been
outlined. In this section, the complete meaning potential will be described. The
frequencies of the major uses of åka in several corpora are shown in Table 3. In
addition to the MPC corpus, frequencies are also shown in the English Swedish
Parallel Corpus (ESPC) and two monolingual corpora included in the Swedish
Language Bank. Fiction refers to Novels II, which contains the complete texts of
60 Swedish novels published 1980–1981 (around 4 million words) and News refers
to The daily newspapaper Dagens Nyheter (DN 1987). (The first 500 lines in the
concordance of “åka, vb.” were analyzed. A few incorrectly included word forms
explain why the total number of occurrences does not add up to 500.) N shows
the number of occurrences and % the proportion in relation to the total number
of occurrences of åka in the corpus. As can be observed, the use as a vehicle verb
clearly dominates in all corpora. The other uses are much less frequent but are
clearly established since they are represented in all corpora.Table 3. Proportions (in %) of the uses of åka in four Swedish corpora
Corpus MPC ESPC Fiction News
N 171 191 805 495
% % % %
Travel in a vehicle 86 87 89 84
Unpleasant situation 6 7 7 11
Uncontrolled motion/Other 8 6 4 5
Total 100 100 100 100Travel in a vehicle is dominant in terms of frequency and must be regarded as
the prototypical meaning in present-day Swedish. In Figure 2, which shows the
relationships between the various senses that make up the meaning potential of
åka, the prototypical meaning appears in a box with double lines. A small number
of cases where a non-prototypical vehicle has been used, for example åka skidor
(‘skis’) ‘to ski’, åka skridskor (‘skates’) ‘to skate’ and åka cykel ‘to bike, ride a bike’
are represented in a separate box. (These have not been counted separately in
Table 3.) The verb can also be used when unconventional means of transporta-
tion are used as in (8), where åka is combined with the bare noun kana ‘slide’.