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Ditransitives in Germanic Languages: Synchronic and diachronic aspects
Edited by Eva Zehentner, Melanie Röthlisberger and Timothy Colleman
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 7] 2023
► pp. 365–375

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.

Keywords: give constructions, cognate verbs, prototypical and peripheral senses, light verbs, congruent translations, divergent translations
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
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.7.11ega
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