Article published In:
Languages in ContrastVol. 16:1 (2016) ► pp.84–117
Verbs of letting in Germanic and Romance languages
A quantitative investigation based on a parallel corpus of film subtitles
This study compares eleven verbs of letting in six Germanic and five Romance languages. The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the differences and similarities in the semasiological variation of these verbs, both across and within the two language groups they represent. The results of a Multidimensional Scaling analysis based on a parallel corpus of film subtitles show that the verbs differ along several semantic dimensions, such as letting versus leaving, factitive versus permissive causation, as well as modality and discourse function. Although the main differences between the verbs lend themselves to a genealogical interpretation (Germanic vs. Romance), a distributional analysis of constructional patterns in which the verbs occur reveals that these differences are in fact distributed areally, with a centre and a periphery.
References
Achard, M
1996 Two Causation/Perception Constructions in French. Cognitive Linguistics 71: 315–357. 
AHD: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
1970 New York: American Heritage.
Apresjan, J
1966 Analyse distributionelle des significations et champs sémantiques structurés. Langages 11: 44–74.
Davidse, K. and Heyvaert, L
2003 On the so-called ‘middle’ construction in English and Dutch. In Corpus-based Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies, S. Granger, J. Lerot and S. Petch-Tyson (eds), 57–73. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Davies, M
2008– The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Retrieved from [URL] [last accessed 15 December 2014].
Deckert, M
2013 Meaning in Subtitling: Toward a Contrastive Cognitive Semantic Model. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Diez, F. Ch. and Donkin, T.C
1864 An Etymological Dictionary of the Romance Languages; Chiefly from the German of Friedrich Diez. Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate. Retrieved from [URL] [last accessed 15 December 2014].
Egan, T
2008 Non-finite Complementation: A Usage-Based Study of Infinitive and -ing Clauses in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Evans, N
2010 Semantic typology. In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology, J.J. Song (ed.), 504–533. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Friedman, V.A
2006 Balkans as a linguistic area. In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Keith Brown (ed.), 2nd ed., 657–672. Oxford: Elsevier.
Geeraerts, D
1998 The semantic structure of the indirect object in Dutch. In The Dative II. Theoretical Approaches, W. Van Langendonck and W. Van Belle (eds), 185–210. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2010 Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Givón, T
Johansson, S
2007 Seeing through Multilingual Corpora. On the Use of Corpora in Contrastive Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Haspelmath, M
2001 The European linguistic area: Standard Average European. In Language Typology and Language Universals, M. Haspelmath, E. König, W. Oesterreicher and W. Raible (eds), 1492–1510. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Hüning, M., Vogl, U., van der Wouden, T. and Verhagen, A
(eds) 2006 Nederlands tussen Duits en Engels [Dutch between German and English]. Leiden: Stichting Neerlandistiek Leiden.
Kemmer, S. and Verhagen, A
1994 The grammar of causatives and the conceptual structure of events. Cognitive Linguistics, 51, 115–156.
Keuleers, E., Brysbaert, M. and New, B
2010 SUBTLEX-NL: A New Frequency Measure for Dutch Words Based on Film Subtitles. Behavior Research Methods 421: 643–650.
Kroonen, G
2013 Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic. Leiden: Brill.
Langacker, R.W
1991 Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Volume II, Descriptive Application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lefer, M-A. and Cartoni, B
2013 Word-formation in original and translated English: Source language influence on the use of un- and -less. In Theoretical and Empirical Advances in Word Formation, J. Fernandez (ed.), 49–59. Special issue of the Quaderns de Filologia de la Universidad de Valencia 18.
Levin, B
1993 English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levshina, N
2015 How Europeans GIVE: A two-layered semantic typology based on parallel corpora. In Causation, Permission, and Transfer: Argument realization in GET, TAKE, PUT, GIVE and LET verbs, B. Nolan, G. Rawoens and E. Diedrichsen (eds), 147–175. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Levshina, N. and Heylen, K
2014 A Radically Data-driven Construction Grammar: Experiments with Dutch causative constructions. In Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar, R. Boogaart, T. Colleman, and G. Rutten (eds), 17–46. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Loewenthal, J
2003 Meaning and use of causeeless causative constructions with laten in Dutch. In Usage-based Approaches to Dutch. Lexicon, Grammar, Discourse, A. Verhagen and J. van de Wejer (eds), 97–129. Utrecht: LOT.
Lowrey, B
2013 The Old English Causative hatan and Its Demise. Token 21:23–43. Retrieved from [URL] [last accessed 17.12.2014].
Malkiel, Y
1968 Essays on Linguistic Themes. Oxford: Blackwell.
Maldonado, R
2007 Soft causatives in Spanish. In On Interpreting Construction Schemas. From Action and Motion to Transitivity and Causality, N. Delbeque and B. Cornillie (eds), 229–260. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Nedjalkov, V
1976 Kausativkonstruktionen. Tübingen: TBL.
Newman, J
1996 Give: A Cognitive Linguistic Study. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
OED: The Oxford English Dictionary
1970 Vol. IV1 (L–M). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
R Core Team
2013 R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Vienna. Retrieved from [URL] [last accessed 15 December 2014].
Rawoens, G
2013 The Swedish Verb låta ‘let’ from a Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective. Language Sciences 361: 113–123.
Rawoens, G. and Egan, T
2013 Distinguishing Causative and Permissive Readings of the Swedish Verb låta
. Functions of Language 20(1): 64–89.
Soares da Silva, A
2003 La structure sémantique de ‘laisser’ dans les langues romanes. In Actas del XXIII Congreso Internacional de Lingüística y Filología Románica. Vol III1, F. Sánchez Miret (ed.), 441–456. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
2004 Imagery in Portuguese causation/perception constructions. In Imagery in Language. Festschrift in Honour of Professor Ronald W. Langacker, B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and A. Kwiatkowska (eds), 297–319. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
2007 Verbs of letting: Some cognitive and historical aspects. In On Interpreting Construction Schemas. From Action and Motion to Transitivity and Causality, N. Delbecque and B. Cornillie (eds), 171–200. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Talmy, L
2000 Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
van der Auwera, J
1998 Introduction. In Adverbial Constructions in the Languages of Europe, J. van der Auwera (ed), 1–23. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Van Olmen, D
2011
The Imperative in English and Dutch: A Functional Analysis Based in Comparable and Parallel Corpora
. PhD diss., Universiteit Antwerpen.
Viberg, Å
2009 The meaning patterns of Swedish låta ‘sound’; ‘let’. A corpus-based contrastive study. In Mélanges plurilingues offerts à Suzanne Schlyter à l’occasion de son 65ème anniversaire [Études romanes de Lund 85], P. Bernardini, V. Egerland and J. Granfeldt (eds.), 455–480. Lund: Romanska institutionen, Lunds universitet.
von Waldenfels, R
2012 The Grammaticalization of ‘give’ + Infinitive: A Comparative Study of Russian, Polish and Czech. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Wälchli, B. and Cysouw, M
2012 Lexical Typology through Similarity Semantics: Toward a Semantic Map of Motion Verbs. Linguistics 50(3): 671–710.
Wierzbicka, A
2006 English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cited by
Cited by 15 other publications
Becker, Laura & Matías Guzmán Naranjo
2020. Psych predicates in European languages. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 73:4 ► pp. 483 ff. 
Becker, Laura & Andrej Malchukov
2022. Semantic maps and typological hierarchies: Evidence for the Actionality Hierarchy. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
Beekhuizen, Barend, Maya Blumenthal, Lee Jiang, Anna Pyrtchenkov & Jana Savevska
2023. Truth be told: a corpus-based study of the cross-linguistic colexification of representational and (inter)subjective meanings. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 0:0
Cacioli, Caterina & Paola Vernillo
Dudău, Diana Paula & Florin Alin Sava
2022. The development and validation of the Romanian version of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 (Ro-LIWC2015). Current Psychology 41:6 ► pp. 3597 ff.
Egan, Thomas & Hildegunn Dirdal
2017. Chapter 1. Lexis in contrast today. In Cross-linguistic Correspondences [Studies in Language Companion Series, 191], ► pp. 1 ff.
Granger, Sylviane & Marie-Aude Lefer
Koplenig, Alexander, Sascha Wolfer & Peter Meyer
2023. A large quantitative analysis of written language challenges the idea that all languages are equally complex. Scientific Reports 13:1
Lefer, Marie-Aude
2020. Parallel Corpora. In A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ► pp. 257 ff.
Levshina, Natalia
2016. Why we need a token-based typology: A case study of analytic and lexical causatives in fifteen European languages. Folia Linguistica 50:2
Levshina, Natalia
2017. Online film subtitles as a corpus: an n-gram approach. Corpora 12:3 ► pp. 311 ff.
Lǐ, Yuèyuán & Dan Ponsford
2018. Predicative reduplication: Functions, their relationships and iconicities. Linguistic Typology 22:1 ► pp. 51 ff.
Schnell, Stefan & Nils Norman Schiborr
2022. Crosslinguistic Corpus Studies in Linguistic Typology. Annual Review of Linguistics 8:1 ► pp. 171 ff.
van der Klis, Martijn & Jos Tellings
2022. Generating semantic maps through multidimensional scaling: linguistic applications and theory. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 18:3 ► pp. 627 ff.
Viberg, Åke
2020. Phenomenon-Based Perception Verbs in Swedish from a Typological and Contrastive Perspective. Syntaxe & Sémantique N° 20:1 ► pp. 17 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.