46 Åke Viberg
uses of köra as a vehicle verb. (The distinction between Transportation of People
and Transportation of Goods has been collapsed because of the small number of
examples.)
Table 5. The major translations of köra as a vehicle verb in the MPC corpus
Total Operate/
travel as a
driver
Transport
(people or
goods)
Vehicle as
subject
Swedish köra 168 74 31 15
English drive 89 57 15 11
take 3
German fahren 90 53 18 14
bringen 7
French conduire 31 19 8 0
(r)emmener 4
Finnish ajaa 84 55 8 12
lähteä 7 3 3 1
Table 5 shows that the vehicle verb that is the closest correspondent of köra domi-
nates as a translation in all the languages except French, where departure verbs and
directional verbs are often used as translations. For Finnish, it can be remarked
that ajaa clearly dominates as a translation and that lähteä ‘leave’ is used in rather
few cases as a translation of köra. This means that the glossing of ajaa as ‘drive’ is
accurate with the additional remark that ajaa can extend its meaning to cover the
basic meaning of åka (‘travel as a passenger’).
Thus all the languages except French tend to use a vehicle verb as a transla-
tion of köra, and even for French it can be noted that the vehicle verb conduire is
used with some frequency even if it is not a dominant translation, whereas vehicle
verbs are marginal as translations of åka and fara (see Table 2 and Table 4). Table 5
shows that all the closest correspondents of köra can be used as transportation
verbs, but in this use verbs meaning ‘take’ or ‘bring’ are also relatively frequent as
translations. In French, there is a contrast between emmener ‘bring people’, which
appears four times as a translation and emporter ‘bring non-human objects (i.e.
Goods)’, which is used as a translation of one example (not shown in Table 5).
The closest equivalents are also dominant as translations when köra has a vehicle
as subject. A clear exception from this is French conduire, which is not used as a
translation of this use.
The number of translations into Dutch is still restricted in the MPC corpus.
For that reason (as mentioned earlier), the translations of Swedish åka and köra
have been studied in the part of the Dutch-Swedish Parallel Corpus (Rawoens