This paper deals with impersonal passives in two Germanic languages, Swedish and Dutch. Impersonal passives constitute one type of impersonal construction (denoting constructions with non-canonical subjects) as described in Siewierska (2008a: 116). Formally, they consist of an overt expletive… read more
The separation or ‘debonding’ of prefixoids in informal language use in Germanic and the question whether spelling reflects re-categorization of such compound members as adjectives have recently been attracting increased attention among linguists. This contribution focuses on category changes… read more
At is commonly understood to be one of three basic topological prepositions in English, the other two being in and on. While there are close equivalents in Swedish and Norwegian to both in and on, this is not the case for at. This chapter investigates the choices made by both Swedish and Norwegian… read more
This paper presents a corpus study of article omission in newspaper headlines. The corpus consists of material from a variety of Dutch and Flemish newspapers. The most important factor influencing the frequency of article omission in headlines is the journalistic genre in which it occurs. The… read more
This paper proposes a new way of identifying and analysing positive transfer on the basis of corpus data. Taking stock of process-oriented research into what is called ‘literal translation’, transfer is defined as an instance in which a translator is primed into using a target language item that… read more
This study accounts for the synchronic profile and the recent history of the Swedish sentence connective så att ‘so that’. In Modern Swedish, this connective allows for a variety of syntactic and semantic patterns that entail particular pragmatic functions. One aim of this study is to find evidence… read more
In this paper we discuss ways in which the concept that, for want of a better word, we may describe as ‘overness’ is coded in motion predications in English and French. The concept of ‘overness’ is a relational one, the basic spatial sense of which involves some sort of (elongated) superiority of a… read more
In this paper an account is given of the semantics of the Present-day Swedish verb låta ‘let’ in constructions with an infinitival complement. It is generally assumed that the verb låta in this construction type can encode either causation or permission. From a synchronic perspective, the… read more