Tracing processes in auxiliarization
Time-sufficiency verbs from a Norwegian-Swedish-English contrastive perspective
This chapter considers the Norwegian verb rekke (‘reach’) and its English correspondences in a bi-directional
translation corpus (ENPC), as well as occurrences of rekke in Norwegian monolingual corpora. We suggest that
rekke is undergoing grammaticalization from a concrete lexical spatial verb towards a (semi-)auxiliary
that contains a component of time sufficiency, similar to Swedish hinna (Johansson & Nordrum 2016), but that rekke is at an earlier stage in this development. We base
this suggestion on the following observations: (1) Swedish hinna was earlier polysemous between space and
time, but can only denote time in present-day Swedish. (2) Norwegian rekke is still polysemous between space
and time, but seems to always denote time when used as a (semi-)auxiliary. The study contributes to the semantic description
of Norwegian rekke, but also has implications for grammaticalization studies as well as for studies of
modality.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Some initial observations about Norwegian rekke – in contrast with Swedish
hinna
- 3.The general procedure of the study and corpus data
- 4.
Rekke in the ENPC compared to hinna in the ESPC
- 4.1Swedish hinna revisited
- 4.2The English correspondences of rekke at a glance
- 4.2.1
Rekke with ability correspondences
- 4.2.2
Rekke with time correspondences
- 4.4.3
Rekke with å-infinitive complementation vs. other types of complements
- 4.2.4
Get-correspondences
- 4.3Summing up the parallel corpus data
- 5.
Rekke in monolingual corpora
- Time sufficiency:
- Time with spatial endpoint:
- Space:
- General sufficiency:
- 6.Is rekke becoming grammaticalized?
- 6.1Steps in space-time semantic change
- 6.1.2Paradigmatization: Is rekke becoming a modal?
- 6.1.3Sufficiency and modality
- 6.1.4The grammaticalization paths of hinna and rekke
- 7.Final remarks
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
-
Corpora
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