The lexical profile of Swedish 53
In another two cases, the translation is börja köra ‘begin drive’, where lähteä con-
tributes the inceptive meaning. In other cases, there is no direct reflection of lähteä
in the translation but åka or köra is used as the only verb as in (29). Inception and
departure can be inferred from context in the Swedish translation.
(29) Menimme autooni ja lähdin ajamaan kaupungin keskustaa kohti.
Vi steg in i min bil och jag körde in mot stadscentrum.
We got into my car and I drove towards the centre of town. (My transl.)
It should be remarked that cases where lähteä appears as a single verb have been
collapsed in Table 8 with cases where lähteä in combination with a verb in the third
infinitive illative (V-mAAn) has been translated with a single verb in Swedish. This
represents a simplification, but the aim of the table is primarily to show that lähteä
is unmarked for manner and appears both in contexts where a vehicle verb is used
and where other types of motion verbs are used. (In addition to the verbs listed in
Table 8, there is a rather large number of motion verbs that only appear one or a
few times as translations. These translations and a number of free translations are
represented as Other in the table. An account of the complete translation pattern
is interesting but would require a separate paper.)
To sum up, it appears that the encoding of inception of motion and of depar-
ture has first priority in Finnish, whereas the fact that the motion is not self-
propelled and involves the use of a vehicle is the first priority in Swedish, where
departure can be explicitly marked by adding a particle such as iväg ‘away’ (see
example above) but can also be left implicit as in (7). What is particularly note-
worthy is that Finnish uses lähteä as the only verb in many cases where the vehicle
verb ajaa appears to be a possible alternative translation of Swedish åka.
- Conclusion
This paper has presented an analysis of the vehicle verbs as an example of a seman-
tic sub-field within the larger field of motion verbs and indicated how the role
fulfilled by such verbs can vary across languages with respect to verbs belonging to
other sub-fields such as departure verbs and directional verbs. The corpus-based
contrastive study has made it possible to make a relatively fine-grained compari-
son of the inventories of general vehicle verbs and their semantic extensions in
Swedish and the other languages included in the study. In addition to that, it has
also identified a number of more far-reaching usage-based differences showing
that languages tend to favour certain perspectives or alternative ways of coding a
certain type of situation. The use of directional verbs in French is a well-known