Tankar kring kring : En diakron studie av prepositionsbruket vid kognitionsverb

• This article deals with the usage of Swedish prepositions with cognition verbs. Our main focus is on the usage of the preposition kring ‘around’. The study is done within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, and the notions of trajectory (TR) and landmark (LM) are used to describe the relationships involved. Questions asked are 1. Has the usage of kring with cognition verbs changed over time? If so, how? and 2. Has the preposition usage with the cognition verbs filosofera ‘philosophize’, fokusera ‘focus’, forska ‘research’, fundera ‘contemplate’, reflektera ‘reflect’, resonera ‘reason’, spekulera ‘speculate’, and tänka ‘think’ changed over time? If so, how?The study is based on news texts from the period of 1923-2012 from the Korp Corpus. Taken together, the investigated data contains 3.7 million sentences and 56 million tokens of press texts.Our results show that changes in the usages of the prepositions are specific to each verb rather than following an overall trend. Throughout the period, the verbs fokusera, fundera, reflektera, spekulera and tänka are used with prepositions that suggest that people’s thoughts (TR) are directed down towards, or into, abstract topics (LM). The verbs filosofera, forska, and resonera, on the other hand, are used with prepositions that suggest thinking (TR) around abstract topics (LM). There is an increase in the usage of kring with resonera, and a decrease in the usage of kring with fokusera.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

cognition verbs

cognitive linguistics

diachronic change

kring

mental representations

news texts

prepositions

Swedish

Swedish

Svenska språket / Nordiska språk

language studies

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)