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- Viberg, Åke, 1945-
(författare)
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Asking and answering. A contrastive study of English and Swedish basic communication verbs
- 2016
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Ingår i: Linguistics Beyond and Within. - Lublin, Poland : John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. ; 2, s. 180-212
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents a contrastive study of the English verbs ask and answer and their Swedish correspondents based on data from the English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC), which is bi-directional and contains Swedish and English original texts and their corresponding translations. As a background, a short overview is given of Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) in general with brief discussions of speech act theory (Searle), direct and reported speech and conceptual frames (FrameNet) and their syntactic realizations. The contrastive study is concerned with networks of polysemy and the relationships of various senses with differing syntactic realizations across languages. The senses of ask are primarily distributed between two verbs in Swedish: fråga ‘ask a question’ and be ‘request (politely)’ but even some verbs with more specific meanings are involved. The concept of answering forms a conceptual network which is similar in English and Swedish but contrasts with respect to the way meanings are divided up between various verbs. English has a number of verbs such as answer, reply, respond, correspond, retort and rejoin, whereas Swedish to a great extent relies on one verb (svara) and its morphological derivations: besvara, ansvara, motsvara, försvara. In the Conclusion, pedagogical applications of the study are briefly discussed.The article is available online (OPEN ACCESS) at:http://lingbaw.com/2016/Åke-Viberg
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| 2. |
- Viberg, Åke, 1945-
(författare)
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Contrasts in construction and semantic composition: The verbs of putting in English and Swedish in an intra-typological perspective
- 2015
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Ingår i: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Verb Constructions. - Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing. - 9781443878081 - 1443878081 ; , s. 222-253
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Verbs of putting such as English put, lay, set and place and Swedish sätta (put-attach), ställa (put-stand) and lägga “lay” contrast along two dimensions: the semantic composition of the verb (e.g. the encoding of Posture) and the constructions that encode path. This variation is studied with data from two parallel corpora containing texts in Swedish, English, German, French and Finnish. The intra-typological variation is great between these genetically and/or areally closely related languages. In Swedish and English, particles with meanings such as IN/OUT and UP/DOWN play a prominent role to signal change-of-place and the reaching of the endpoint of motion, but verbs of putting are special since particles are optional and change-of-place is encoded in a non-canonical way and may be signaled only in the verb (as in French). In French, change-of-place tends to be encoded in the verb, whereas German and Finnish exploit case in two different ways to signal change-of-place.As for the semantic composition of the verbs, all the languages studied can distinguish placement inside or on the surface of another object (the Ground). Swedish, German and to a certain extent also English contrast the resulting orientation of the moved object (the Figure) based on postural distinctions (related to the contrasts between SIT-STAND-LIE). In Europe, such distinctions are characteristic of Germanic and Slavic languages. Using information from other studies, it is possible to show that the intra-typological variation is extensive with respect to postural distinctions.
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| 3. |
- Viberg, Åke, 1945-
(författare)
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Contrasts in morphology : The case of UP/DOWN and IN/OUT as bound morphemes in Swedish and their English correspondences
- 2017. - 1
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Ingår i: Contrasting English and Other Languages through Corpora. - Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing. - 1443896012 - 9781443896016 ; , s. 32-74
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In their use as spatial verbal particles, the morphemes up, down, in and out correspond relatively closely to Swedish upp, ner/ned, in and ut. However, if all uses of these morphemes are taken into consideration, there is a very notable difference. In Swedish, these morphemes frequently are used as the initial element in compound verbs, usually with an abstract meaning. Compare: Ann går in i huset ‘Ann goes into the house’ and Service ingår i priset [ingoes in price-the] ‘Service is included in the price’. Unlike the more well-known alternation between free and bound forms of the corresponding spatial morphemes in German, which is grammatically conditioned, the alternation in Swedish is both semantically and stylistically motivated, although it will be argued that the primary function of the bound forms in Swedish is to fill lexical gaps in abstract semantic fields. The use across different registers is compared between English and Swedish based on large monolingual corpora. In both languages, free forms are more frequent in spoken language and fiction than in news and academic prose, whereas bound forms in Swedish are most frequent in academic prose. The semantic analysis is based primarily on The English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). All occurrences in the ESPC of the bound forms in compound verbs in Swedish have been coded and classified into semantic fields and compared to their translations into English. This means that the contrastive comparison basically serves to analyze the function of the Swedish verbs, but the result highlights the general difference in morphological transparency between English and Swedish. The morphological transparency of the Swedish compound verbs is almost complete, whereas their English correspondences frequently are of Romance origin and at best are only morphologically semitransparent. Ultimately, this may have consequences for learnability. The realization of the meanings UP/DOWN and IN/OUT as free or bound morphemes forms a continuum across European languages. Based on earlier research, the place of English and Swedish in this continuum is briefly discussed.
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| 4. |
- Viberg, Åke, 1945-
(författare)
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Finding a model for contrastive lexical semantics : A look at verbal communication verbs
- 2017
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Ingår i: Linguistics Beyond and Within (LingBaW). - Lublin : The Faculty of Humanities, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. - 2450-5188. ; 3, s. 195-215
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A basic problem for contrastive lexical studies in general is to find a model for the semantic analysis. This paper is one in a series of corpus-based contrastive studies of the field of Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) in English and Swedish. Searle’s classification of speech acts serves as an important starting point but is not directly concerned with lexical structure, which is a major concern for the two theories that are compared in this study. FrameNet based on Fillmore’s theory of semantic frames and Wierzbicka’s theory of semantic primitives (or “primes”). The theories are applied and tested on data from the English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) containing English and Swedish original texts together with their translations into the other language. Primarily two groups of English verbs and their Swedish correspondents will be analyzed: (1) Information verbs such as tell, inform, notify, report, narrate and describe and (2) Speech activity verbs such as talk, speak, chat, converse, gossip, discuss, debate, negotiate and bargain. There is also an analysis of Swedish berätta ‘tell, narrate’ based on the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (MPC) as an example of multilingual contrastive analysis. Frames relate in a clear way the conceptual structure and the syntactic argument structure, which is very useful in a contrastive study. However, the definition of the meaning of individual verbs is incomplete and needs to be complemented with some kind of decompositional analysis such as the theory of semantic primes. A special section is devoted to an analysis of a large number of compound and derived forms of the Swedish verb tala ‘speak’ and a discussion of how contrasts in morphological structure can affect the lexical contrasts between two languages.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Viberg, Åke, 1945-
(författare)
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Phenomenon-based perception verbs in Swedish from a typological and contrastive perspective
- 2019
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Ingår i: Perception, perceptibilité et objet perçu. Approches inter-langues. - Caen : Presses Universitaires de Caen. - 9782841339532 ; , s. 17-48
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The article starts with a brief review of current studies of perception verbs as a background to the major part of the paper, which is devoted to a discussion of Phenomenon-based perception verbs. Three broad types are distinguished: sensory copulas, perceptibility verbs and sensory verbs. Verbs of these types appear across the five sense modalities. The categorization is tested on data from a translation corpus consisting of Swedish original novels translated into English, German, French and Finnish. The paper focuses on vision and audition, in particular the Swedish sensory copula verbs se ut “look” (e.g. “look happy”) and låta “sound” and their translations. In the prototypical meaning, these verbs combine the reference to a sense modality with a modal or evidential component (roughly: SEEM). One of these components can be bleached to various degrees depending on the grammatical context. It turns out that French to a much greater extent than the other languages uses verbs that are unmarked for the sense modality. The place of the result within a general typological framework is briefly discussed. Perceptual verbs referring to an Experience such as see and hear follow a universal lexicalization hierarchy, whereas the structuring of Phenomenon-based verbs is typologically variable.
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| 7. |
- Viberg, Åke, 1945-
(författare)
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Polysemy in action: The Swedish verb slå 'hit, strike, beat' in a crosslinguistic perspective
- 2016. - 1
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Ingår i: The lexical typology of semantic shifts. - Berlin / Boston : Walter de Gruyter. - 9783110377521 - 9783110377675 - 9783110393064 ; , s. 177-222
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The chapter analyses the pattern of polysemy of the Swedish verb slå ‘hit, strike, beat’. The major hypothesis is that a large proportion of the many meanings of this verb are best understood as extensions (semantic shifts) from a prototype representing slå as a hand action, which can be described as a goal-directed physical action sequence. The meaning of the verb interacts with the meaning of nouns serving as arguments to produce new meanings in context and recurrent, thus inferred meanings are lexicalized and serve as the source of further meaning shifts. Meanings are related in networks. Shifts are studied primarily synchronically but examples are given of how meanings are lost over time in a way that breaks the links between related meanings leaving idiom-like expressions behind. However, the distinction between synchrony and diachrony forms a continuum, due i.a. to register variation. The analysis is based on a multilingual translation corpus, which makes it possible to see how the meanings of the Swedish verb are reflected in translations. Crosslinguistic data are also presented from earlier studies of verbs of hitting
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| 8. |
- Viberg, Åke, 1945-
(författare)
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Saying, talking and telling : Basic verbal communication verbs in Swedish and English
- 2017. - 1
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Ingår i: Cross-linguistic Correspondences. - Amsterdam / Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing Company. - 9789027259561 - 9789027264725 ; , s. 37-74
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study compares the major Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) in English say, tell, speak and talk with their Swedish correspondents säga, berätta, tala and prata. The analysis is based on data from the English Swedish Parallel Corpus. The semantic and functional description of the verbs is based on the theory of semantic frames and on speech act theory. The verbs are used primarily to report speech, but say and tell and Swedish säga are used also metalinguistically as a commentary on the current discourse as it unfolds. In English, talk and speak turn out to have a wide range of uses that are divided up in a different way in Swedish, whereas tala has many language-specific uses in Swedish. Tell has two major semantic correspondents in Swedish, berätta, which is used to report acomplex sequence of events or facts, and the particle verb tala om, which tends to report a single fact. However, tell has a rather general meaning and the most frequent translation is actually säga ‘say’. That tell lacks a direct equivalent inSwedish also explains why tell turns out to be significantly underrepresented in English texts that are translated from Swedish in comparison to original English texts. Genre-based differences are also discussed. For example, not only are say and säga much more frequent in fiction than in non-fiction, but the uses are also distributed differently.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Viberg, Åke, 1945-
(författare)
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What happens in translation? : A comparison of original and translated texts containing verbs meaning SIT, STAND and LIE in the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC)
- 2016
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Ingår i: Nordic Journal of English Studies. - 1502-7694 .- 1654-6970. ; 15:3, s. 102-148
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article studies translation effects by comparing the use of verbs meaning SIT, STAND and LIE in original and translated texts in the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). Effects on both the frequency of use and the use of lexical and structural translation shifts are studied. Postural verbs have a much higher frequency overall in Swedish than in English. In Swedish translated texts, postural verbs are significantly under-represented in comparison to original texts, whereas postural verbs are significantly over-represented in English translations. At a more fine-grained level, it is possible to show that various categories are treated differently, in particular the types of subjects. The effect on frequency is stronger for Human subjects, which represent an unmarked category, than it is for Inanimate subjects, which are more marked. However, the pattern of over- and under-representation presupposes a functional overlap across languages. Writing as subject, which is a category that is unique to Swedish in relation to English, follows a different pattern. (This type of subject appears in examples such as: Nyheten står i tidningen ‘The news is (literally: stands) in the paper’). The result is discussed both from the point of view of the research methodology used in contrastive studies based on translation corpora and from a theoretical point of view. For methodology, the conclusion is that frequencies can be considerably skewed, whereas a language remains true to its system of basic semantic contrasts in professional translations. Theoretically, the result can be related to theories of language contact and studies of second language acquisition and bilingual development.
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