Åke Viberg

The verbs of perception: a typological study

The number of studies devoted to the lexicon from a universal or typological point of view is very sparse in comparison to the — by now — vast literature dealing with syntax and phonology. One exception is the many studies that have followed in the wake of Basic Color Terms (Berlin and Kay 1969). Like this study, lexical studies with a universal aim have in general, it seems, been concerned with the lexicalization patterns within a specific semantic field. Such studies have dealt with fields such as body parts (Andersen 1978), ethnobiological taxonomies (e.g. Berlin 1978), cooking verbs (Lehrer 1974: ch. 8) and verbs of motion (Talmy 1975). Scovels (1971) comparison of the verbs of perception in five languages is the closest precursor of the present study. From a somewhat different perspective, Dixon (1977) has looked at which fields have the strongest tendency to lexicalize as adjectives.

Progression & regression in language : sociocultural, neuropsychological, & linguistic perspectives

Part I. Introduction: 1. Linguistic progression and regression: an introduction Kenneth Hyltenstam and Ake Viberg Part II. The Sociological Setting: 2. The role of pidgin and creole languages in languages progression and regression Peter Muhlhausler 3. Structure and practice in language shift Jane Hill 4. Growing up monolingual in a multilingual community: how language socialisation patterns are leading to language shift in Gapun (Papua New Guinea) Don Kulick 5. Language change in a creole continuum: decreolisation? Charlene Sato Part III. Psycho- and Neurolinguistic Aspects: 6. Neurolinguistic aspects of first language acquisition and loss Jean Berko Gleason 7. Neurolinguistic aspects of second language development and attrition Loraine K. Obler 8. Second language acquisition as a function of age: research findings and methodological issues 9. Second language regression Alzheimers dementia Kenneth Hyltenstam and Christopher Stroud Part IV. The Linguistic Perspective: 10. Crosslinguistic perspectives on native language acquisition Ruth Berman 11. Syntactic development in Danish L2 Anne Holmen 12. The weaker language in bilingual Swedish-French children Suzzane Schlyter 13. Four operating principles and input distribution as explanations for underdeveloped and mature morphological systems Roger Andersen 14. Crosslinguistic perspectives on lexical organisation and lexical progression Ake Viberg 15. Attrition or expansion? changes in the lexicon of Finnish and American adult bilinguals in Sweden Sally Boyd Part V. The Linguistic Perspective 2: Phonology: 16. The development of phonological abilities Henning Wode 17. The course of development in second language phonology acquisition: a natural path or strategic choice? Bjorn Hammarberg 18. Sociolinguistic factors in loss and acquisition of phonology Roy C. Major Index.

Towards a lexical profile of the Swedish verb lexicon

Abstract This paper will provide a typological-contrastive sketch of the lexical semantic structure of the verb lexicon in Swedish based on data from translation corpora and the information on lexical typology currently available in published works. As a background, a brief survey is given of basic verbs in European languages. The major part of the paper is devoted to sketches of the most frequent verbs within some of the most basic semantic fields such as Posture, Location, Motion and Possession. Language-specific lexical differentiation is exemplified by the verbs of putting sätta-ställa-lägga and an example of an extensive language-specific pattern of polysemy is presented in an analysis of the very frequent verb få ‘get, may’. The paper also discusses some cases of grammaticalization such as the use of gå ‘go’ as a marker of a specific type of possibility.

Physical contact verbs in English and Swedish from the perspective of crosslinguistic lexicology

The major English physical contact verbs strike, hit and beat are compared with their primary Swedish translation equivalent sla on the basis of data from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The analysis is carried out within two theoretical frameworks concerning the underlying conceptual representation and the linguistic cues that can be used for word sense identification. In addition to a rather detailed account of points of contrast in the fairly extensive patterns of polysemy that are characteristic of the verbs, an attempt is made to provide a general characterisation in contrastive terms. In comparison with the English verbs, the conceptual representation of sla is grounded more firmly in sensorimotor experience and the fact that hitting prototypically is a hand action. As in other languages such as Chinese, the main verb of hitting in Swedish has extended senses that refer to other types of hand actions. With respect to word sense identification, the semantic classification of the subject and object is a prominent cue for the distinction between the major meanings of the main physical contact verbs but to various degrees in English and Swedish. Several examples are also given of cases where linguistic cues are not sufficient and disambiguation must be based on topical or pragmatic information.

Language-specific meanings in contrast: A corpus-based contrastive study of Swedish få ‘get’

Abstract The present paper presents a study of the meaning potential of the Swedish verb få ‘get’ in a contrastive perspective. The meaning potential represents the total set of senses of a word and their relationships. The verb få has a complex pattern of polysemy and grammaticalization including lexical as well as modal, aspectual and causative grammatical meanings and the interpretation of få in text is based on syntactic, lexical semantic and pragmatic cues. The total set of meanings form a very language-specific pattern. Data consist of close to 1 000 occurrences of få in a multilingual parallel corpus consisting of extracts from 10 Swedish original novels and their translations into English, German, French and Finnish. If the meaning ‘come to possess (something concrete)’ is regarded as the prototypical meaning, få has rather direct equivalents in English get, German bekommen and kriegen and Finnish saada, whereas French lacks a clear equivalent already in this sense. With respect to most of the other senses (or uses), the meaning potential of få is more or less unique in relation to the other languages except for Finnish saada. The major aim of the present paper is to describe how unique meaning patterns can be expressed in other languages. A study of the translation patterns reveals extensive use of syntactic restructuring to render certain meanings or the use of verbs with very different meaning potentials which overlap only partly with that of få. The latter applies in particular to the modal meanings and the very language-specific combination of the seemingly contradictory meanings permission and obligation. Not only are verbs with other basic meanings than ‘get, come to possess’ used as translations in the other languages but distinctions between modal meanings are drawn in different ways. The results of the contrastive study are briefly discussed also within a typological framework.

Emotion and emotionality as a hidden dimension of lexicon and discourse

In her thought-provoking article, Aneta Pavlenko approaches emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon from an impressive number of different perspectives. This is particularly welcome, since most models of linguistic structure do not account for emotional meanings in a systematic way. One exception worth mentioning, however, is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL; Halliday, 1985/1994) with its broad division of functions into the textual, ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. Whereas the textual metafunction is concerned with the flow of information and the ideational with the construction of experience, the interpersonal function is concerned with interaction between people including the sharing of feelings. Recently, this last aspect has been developed more on the basis of SFL within Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005), where attitudinal meanings are divided into Affect (the construal of emotion into the frame I feel (very) __), Judgment (social/moral evaluation of people) and Appreciation (aesthetic evaluation of things). The theory has primarily been applied to the development of the expression of feeling and evaluation in student writing in schools, based on qualitative analysis of corpora. The framework has also recently been applied to other languages than English as in Folkeryd (2006), who shows how the expression of affect and other evaluative resources are used in various story genres by Swedish students in grades 5, 8 and 11. The expression of attitudinal meanings turned out to be a problem characteristic of low-achieving students. This study includes bilingual students but they are not focused on in the published work.

The typological profile of Swedish – an introduction

The typological profile of a language is an account of the distinctive character of its structure in relation to other languages based primarily on work in general typology but also on genetic and areal linguistics and on contrastive analysis and other types of crosslinguistic studies. Ideally, the profile should cover all major aspects of language structure but it is also possible to present the profile of a certain level such as the phonological, the syntactic or the lexical profile of a language. According to Bernard Comrie (2001) “Linguistic typology can be defined as the systematic study of crosslinguistic variation.” Somewhat surprisingly, this definition, as Comrie notes, makes no mention of the notion ‘linguistic type’, since it is not relevant to some approaches to linguistic typology. The idea of a typological profile of an individual language (or group of related languages) also leaves it open to what extent it will be possible to refer (some level of) the language to a more general type. Rather, the idea is to give a systematic account of the values of the language with respect to basic typological parameters studied within general typology with a focus on language-specific features in order to portray its distinctive character. Since many features are genetically and/or areally distributed, there will often be good reason to situate various structures of the profiled language with respect to genetic and areal patterning, which, however, will present a rather complex picture since the degree to which various features fit into such patterns tends to vary. The term “typological profile of Swedish” (in Swedish: svenskans typologiska profil) to a great extent has been used in work concerned with the acquisition of Swedish as a second language (see 2.5). This has been the view presented by the editor of this volume and may not represent the major focus of all the other contributors. But all work that focuses on the language-specific features of a language is relevant for its typological profile and the fact that the contributors have somewhat different points of departure will assure that various aspects of the typological profile of Swedish will be approached with a broad and varied perspective. In the next section, a brief review will be given of earlier work relevant for the study of the typological profile of Swedish. Following that, there is a section presenting the individual contributions to this volume.

The course of development in second language phonology acquisition: a natural path or strategic choice?

The course of development in second language phonology acquisition : A natural path or strategic choice?

Progression & regression in language: Index

Part I. Introduction: 1. Linguistic progression and regression: an introduction Kenneth Hyltenstam and Ake Viberg Part II. The Sociological Setting: 2. The role of pidgin and creole languages in languages progression and regression Peter Muhlhausler 3. Structure and practice in language shift Jane Hill 4. Growing up monolingual in a multilingual community: how language socialisation patterns are leading to language shift in Gapun (Papua New Guinea) Don Kulick 5. Language change in a creole continuum: decreolisation? Charlene Sato Part III. Psycho- and Neurolinguistic Aspects: 6. Neurolinguistic aspects of first language acquisition and loss Jean Berko Gleason 7. Neurolinguistic aspects of second language development and attrition Loraine K. Obler 8. Second language acquisition as a function of age: research findings and methodological issues 9. Second language regression Alzheimers dementia Kenneth Hyltenstam and Christopher Stroud Part IV. The Linguistic Perspective: 10. Crosslinguistic perspectives on native language acquisition Ruth Berman 11. Syntactic development in Danish L2 Anne Holmen 12. The weaker language in bilingual Swedish-French children Suzzane Schlyter 13. Four operating principles and input distribution as explanations for underdeveloped and mature morphological systems Roger Andersen 14. Crosslinguistic perspectives on lexical organisation and lexical progression Ake Viberg 15. Attrition or expansion? changes in the lexicon of Finnish and American adult bilinguals in Sweden Sally Boyd Part V. The Linguistic Perspective 2: Phonology: 16. The development of phonological abilities Henning Wode 17. The course of development in second language phonology acquisition: a natural path or strategic choice? Bjorn Hammarberg 18. Sociolinguistic factors in loss and acquisition of phonology Roy C. Major Index.

Progression & regression in language: Contents

Part I. Introduction: 1. Linguistic progression and regression: an introduction Kenneth Hyltenstam and Ake Viberg Part II. The Sociological Setting: 2. The role of pidgin and creole languages in languages progression and regression Peter Muhlhausler 3. Structure and practice in language shift Jane Hill 4. Growing up monolingual in a multilingual community: how language socialisation patterns are leading to language shift in Gapun (Papua New Guinea) Don Kulick 5. Language change in a creole continuum: decreolisation? Charlene Sato Part III. Psycho- and Neurolinguistic Aspects: 6. Neurolinguistic aspects of first language acquisition and loss Jean Berko Gleason 7. Neurolinguistic aspects of second language development and attrition Loraine K. Obler 8. Second language acquisition as a function of age: research findings and methodological issues 9. Second language regression Alzheimers dementia Kenneth Hyltenstam and Christopher Stroud Part IV. The Linguistic Perspective: 10. Crosslinguistic perspectives on native language acquisition Ruth Berman 11. Syntactic development in Danish L2 Anne Holmen 12. The weaker language in bilingual Swedish-French children Suzzane Schlyter 13. Four operating principles and input distribution as explanations for underdeveloped and mature morphological systems Roger Andersen 14. Crosslinguistic perspectives on lexical organisation and lexical progression Ake Viberg 15. Attrition or expansion? changes in the lexicon of Finnish and American adult bilinguals in Sweden Sally Boyd Part V. The Linguistic Perspective 2: Phonology: 16. The development of phonological abilities Henning Wode 17. The course of development in second language phonology acquisition: a natural path or strategic choice? Bjorn Hammarberg 18. Sociolinguistic factors in loss and acquisition of phonology Roy C. Major Index.