Polysemy in action: The Swedish verb slå 'hit, strike, beat' in a crosslinguistic perspective

• 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

Ämnesord

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

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

Nyckelord

lexical typology

semantics

polysemy

Linguistics

Lingvistik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kap (ämneskategori)