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

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