Abstract
This article presents a contrastive study of the English verbs ask and answer and their Swedish correspondents based on data from the English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC), which is bi-directional and contains Swedish and English original texts and their corresponding translations. As a background, a short overview is given of Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) in general with brief discussions of speech act theory (Searle), direct and reported speech and conceptual frames (FrameNet) and their syntactic realizations. The contrastive study is concerned with networks of polysemy and the relationships of various senses with differing syntactic realizations across languages. The senses of ask are primarily distributed between two verbs in Swedish: fråga ‘ask a question’ and be ‘request (politely)’ but even some verbs with more specific meanings are involved. The concept of answering forms a conceptual network which is similar in English and Swedish but contrasts with respect to the way meanings are divided up between various verbs. English has a number of verbs such as answer, reply, respond, correspond, retort and rejoin, whereas Swedish to a great extent relies on one verb (svara) and its morphological derivations: besvara, ansvara, motsvara, försvara. In the Conclusion, pedagogical applications of the study are briefly discussed.
Highlights
This paper is one in a series of studies of Swedish Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) with a special focus on the most frequent verbs
A primary speech situation where someone called Peter acts as Speaker and makes a request, for example Open the door! and a secondary speech situation, where a second speaker reports the utterance made by the first speaker, for example Peter told me to open the door
The verb ask is interesting because it has a number of different meanings, each of which appear in specific types of constructions that serve as cues for the interpretation, when the verb appears in different contexts
Summary
This paper is one in a series of studies of Swedish Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) with a special focus on the most frequent verbs. The lexico-grammatical analysis of the verbs of asking and answering in English and Swedish will be based on the ESPC as a comparable corpus by extracting concordances of all the occurrences in original texts of each verb. In this way it is possible to identify a set of uses of each verb. (A use combines aspects of the meaning of the verb and the grammatical constructions in which it appears.) Only in a second step will the ESPC be used as a translation corpus by looking at the translations of each use In this way, it is possible to make comparisons based on the translation patterns in combination with comparisons that are based exclusively on original texts in both languages.
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