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Finding a model for contrastive lexical semantics: A look at verbal communication verbs

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Viberg Å.

Linguistics Beyond and Within

2017

vol. 3

195-215

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.

Asking and answering: A contrastive study of English and Swedish basic communication verbs

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Viberg Å.

Linguistics Beyond and Within

2016

vol. 2

180-212

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.

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2 Linguistics Beyond and Within

2 Viberg Å.

1 2017

1 2016

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Finding a model for contrastive lexical semantics: A look at verbal communication verbs

Asking and answering: A contrastive study of English and Swedish basic communication verbs