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