A Contrastive Lexical Description of Basic Verbs

Abstract

This paper aims at a lexical description of frequent uses of frequent lexical verbs in Swedish on the background of Czech, with some implications for the lexical description of such verb uses verbs in general. It results in a draft of a production lexicon of Swedish frequent verbs for advanced Czech learners of Swedish, with focus on their uses as light verbs. The introductory sections (1 and 2) discuss semantic shifts in highly frequent lexical verbs, whose most literal or ‘primary’ uses express motion, location, or physical control; e.g. stand, put, go, hold. These verbs are called basic verbs, which is a term coined by Viberg (Viberg, 1990) that suggests that they typically denote events belonging to basic level categories described by Lakoff (Lakoff, 1987). The ‘literalness’ of verb uses is judged according to how much they are the ones speakers pick first to illustrate the meaning of that given verb (cognitive salience, a term coined by Hanks in (Hanks, forthcoming). Hanks pointed out an interesting discrepancy between the cognitive salience and the actual frequency of a given verb usage in large corpora. This discrepancy is extremely significant in basic verbs. Some of their uses exhibit such a low cognitive salience, that they are not even noticed by native speakers. This has consequences in second-language acquisition. Foreign learners, even the advanced ones, often lack competence in using the most frequent lexical verbs of the second language in their most frequent patterns. Basic verbs often act as light verbs. Sections 3 to 7 are dedicated to light verbs and light verb constructions. Section 8 discusses the morphosyntactic variability in predicate nouns (i.e. the nominal components of light verb constructions) and their possible semantic impact on the entire light verb construction. Different aspects of polysemy of basic verbs are dealt with by contrasting Swedish examples to Czech in Section 9. Special attention is paid to uses of basic verbs that denote relations between abstract entities. Section 10 focuses on grammaticalizing uses of lexical verbs. It gives a Swedish example of context-induced reinterpretation – an interesting semantic shift that often leads to grammaticalization.