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Probing the linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Swedish

Author

Editor

  • Anetta Kopecka
  • Bhuvana Narasimhan

Summary, in English

This paper explores the linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Swedish. Drawing on elicited spoken data, it provides a unified approach to caused motion descriptions. The results show uniform syntactic behaviour of placement and removal descriptions and a consistent asymmetry between placement and removal in the semantic specificity of verbs. The results also reveal three further semantic patterns, pertaining to the nature of the relationship between Figure and Ground, that appear to account for how these event types are characterised, viz. whether the Ground is represented by a body part of the Agent; whether the Figure is contained within the Ground; or whether it is supported by the Ground.

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Pages

167-182

Publication/Series

Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective

Document type

Book chapter

Publisher

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Keywords

  • Swedish
  • placement
  • semantic typology
  • removal

Status

Published