The aim of this dissertation is to give a detailed analysis of the Dutch verb komen ‘come’ and the Swedish verb komma ‘come’ based on a systematic comparison. Focus has been placed on grammatical polysemy and the study is written within the framework of cognitive linguistics. Both verbs can be defined as corresponding to a complex category consisting of a prototypical meaning and other meanings which can be central or peripheral in relation to the prototype. Two monolingual corpora consisting of newspaper texts were used as sources of data: INL 27 Miljoen Woorden Krantencorpus 1995 and Press 95, 96, 97 Concordances in Göteborg University’s Bank of Swedish. A sample of 1,490 tokens of komen and 1,518 tokens of komma was taken from the two corpora. When analyzing the two verbs and their context the following ten variables were taken into consideration: 1) physical movement, 2) animate or inanimate subject, 3) adverbial, 4) future reference 5) bounded or unbounded aktionsart, 6) ingressive meaning, 7) accidentality, 8) infinitive marker, 9) predictive and/or intentional meaning, and 10) causativity. The results indicate that komen and komma have the same prototypical meaning. However, the semantic extensions from the prototype differ between the two verbs. If we consider the two verbs in a network, the meanings of komen and komma occupy different positions relative to the prototype. On the one hand, when Dutch komen is a copulative verb and/or occurs in lexicalized verb phrases, the resultative meaning is more central, while the aspectual meaning is peripheral. On the other hand, the temporal meaning of Swedish komma, as a future auxiliary verb, holds a more central position than the resultative meaning which is more peripheral. Nevertheless, Dutch komen, which is not considered a future auxiliary verb, but is rather an aspectual auxiliary verb shows similarities in the present tense (komen te + V2) with the Swedish kommer att construction (a true future auxiliary verb). That is, Dutch komen can have clear future reference, but in a limited context. Whereas Dutch komen is categorized as a copulative verb, the Swedish komma is not considered a copulative verb. Nevertheless, it is clear from the corpus that Swedish komma has a copula-like function, but in a limited context. Finally, it has become clear that komen and komma have undergone somewhat different grammaticalization processes even though both verbs contain similar meanings.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-850 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Johansson, Annika |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Avdelningen för nederländska |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, monograph, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Stockholm studies in Scandinavian philology, 0562-1097 ; N.S., 40 |
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