Giving in English and Norwegian
A contrastive perspective
This chapter investigates ditransitive constructions and their
prepositional dative alternates, containing the cognate verbs English
give and Norwegian gi, using data from
the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus (Johansson 2007). The bi-directional nature of the corpus enables
us not only to compare the distribution of constructions in the original
texts in the two languages but also to investigate how individual tokens are
translated into the other language. The analysis shows that give
constructions in the two languages are remarkably similar in their semantics
and their distribution. There are, however, some differences, including the
greater incidence of light verb constructions in English, and a tendency for
Norwegian translators to employ a get construction with the
recipient recoded as subject rather than indirect/prepositional
object.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background, data and methodology
- 2.1Ditransitive give constructions in English and
Norwegian
- 2.2Data and methodology
- 3.Original texts in comparison
- 3.1Overall results
- 3.2The individual semantic combinations
- 3.2.1Ag-Tr-An-C
- 3.2.2Ag-Tr-An-Ab
- 3.2.3Ag-Ntr-An-C and
Ag-Ntr-An-Ab
- 3.2.4Ag-Ntr-In-C
- 3.2.5Ag-Ntr-In-Ab
- 3.2.6St-Ntr-An-C
- 3.2.7St-Ntr-An-Ab
- 3.2.8St-Ntr-In-Ab
- 4.Translation evidence
- 4.1Overall results
- 4.2Divergent translations
- 4.3Translation of light verb constructions
- 4.4OO translated as OP and vice versa
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References