Contrasts in morphology : The case of UP/DOWN and IN/OUT as bound morphemes in Swedish and their English correspondences

• 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.

Nyckelord

contrastive studies

morphology

spatial particles

verbal compounding

Linguistics

Lingvistik

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