50 Åke Viberg
Otherwise (as shown above) other types of verbs such as directional verbs and
departure verbs are used as translations of the general vehicle verbs in Swedish.
Semantically, Finnish has a vehicle verb ajaa, which has an extension which is
similar to German fahren, Danish and Norwegian k(j)øre and Icelandic aka and
keyra. However, this verb is not the most frequent translation of åka. As will be
discussed further in Section 9, Finnish tends to use another type of perspective
than Swedish to express travelling in a vehicle as a passenger.
The contrasts discussed in this paper form part of an areal pattern in European
languages according to a survey (Viberg ms. 2012) where the data from the lan-
guages in the MPC corpus have been complemented with data from other lan-
guages based on dictionaries and a restricted number of translated examples.
There is an areal belt in Europe, where motion in a vehicle is obligatorily marked
in the verb. Whether motion in a vehicle is obligatorily marked in the verb or
not is closely related to the existence of a frequent general motion verb corre-
sponding semantically to English go. Continental Scandinavian languages together
with German and the Baltic and North (i.e. East and West) Slavic languages form
a block and make a more or less obligatory lexical distinction between moving
on foot and travelling in a vehicle and do not have a general motion verb cor-
responding to English go (general ‘go’) but rather a verb which can be symbol-
ized as ‘walk=go’. North Slavic languages go one step further than Germanic (and
other European languages) by marking vehicle consistently also when expressing
motion towards a deictic focus (‘coming’) with prefixes on vehicle verbs. Like the
languages in this study, all European languages tend to have a vehicle verb that can
express the meaning ‘to operate a vehicle’.- A contrasting usage pattern: Finnish lähteä
As has been shown, vehicle verbs are not always the dominant translation of the
Swedish vehicle verbs. This is most characteristic of French. The use of directional
verbs in French is often the only means to express direction, which in many cases
is more important information even in Swedish than the information that the
movement involves a vehicle. The French translations will not be commented on
further, since the use of directional verbs is well known and represents a general
phenomenon that is characteristic of motion verbs in general in French.
The use of lähteä in Finnish is a less well-known example of the fact that usage
patterns may deviate from what can be predicted from lexical inventories. For that
reason, a short characterization will be given of lähteä based on extracts from 13
Finnish novels and their Swedish translations. In total, there are 599 occurrences
of lähteä. As can be observed in Table 8, Verbs of departure is the largest group