The lexical profile of Swedish 27
in examples where the moment-of-change is highlighted as in He was running
into the room when I saw him. Among the Romance languages, Italian has been
shown (Iacobini & Masini 2006) to have some verb-particle combinations of the
Germanic type that alternate with synthetic directional verbs, for example entrare/
andare dentro ‘enter’/‘go in(to)’. Sometimes the verb-particle constructions rep-
resent a less formal variant in Standard Italian. Verb-particle constructions are
widespread in some dialects, especially in northern Italy.
The distinction between verb- and satellite-framed languages is based on the
expression of Path (and Direction). The continuous nature of the typological divi-
sion is also reflected in studies that look at the related (but not identical) param-
eter of Manner Salience. The continuous nature of the contrast between Germanic
and Romance languages is highlighted in Lepetit and Schøsler (2009), who show
that the difference with respect to the number of types of manner of motion verbs
in texts is less pronounced than with respect to the number of tokens of such
verbs. In Danish, 58% of the types of motion verbs were manner verbs versus 39%
in French. However, with respect to tokens only 11% of the French motion verbs
were manner verbs versus 40% for Danish. The degree of Manner salience cuts
across genetic groupings. Hasko (2010) shows that Russian is more manner salient
than English, whereas Serbo-Croatian (Filipović 2007) and Polish (Kopecka 2010)
are less manner salient than English. According to these studies, Manner salience
follows the scale Russian > English > Polish, Serbo-Croatian.
2.2 Swedish motion verbs
Motion verbs can be divided into subject-centered motion verbs such as walk and
fall, where the motion of the subject is described and object-centered motion verbs
such as put and throw, where the motion of the object is focused. Figure 1 gives an
overview of major types of subject-centered motion verbs in Swedish. An impor-
tant characteristic of subjects that refer to human beings is their propensity for
self-propelled motion. This feature is acquired early by infants (Spelke et al. 1995).
Unlike a ball that starts moving because it is hit by something, human beings have
an inner source of energy, which can make them move. Bodily locomotion verbs
such as walk, run and swim more or less by definition describe self-propelled
motion. Such verbs contrast with other subject-centered motion verbs such as fall
and slip, which are not self-propelled. The Swedish verb åka, which plays a central
role in the account given below, is also non-self-propelled.
The verbs komma ‘come’ and gå ‘go’ belong to a small set of very frequent lexi-
cal verbs referred to as nuclear verbs in Viberg (1993). In the Swedish SUC corpus
(the Stockholm-Umeå Corpus), there are around 600 verbs of motion (types).