Basic Verbs of Possession

Abstract

Verbs of possession such as HAVE and GIVE have been extensively studied both typologically and from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The present study presents an analysis of possession verbs as a semantic field with a focus on the most basic verbs. It combines a corpus-based contrastive analysis with a sketch of a general lexical typology of possession verbs. The contrastive part consists of an analysis primarily of the Swedish verbs ge ‘give’, få ‘get’ and ta ‘take’ and their correspondents in some genetically and/or areally related languages. Data are taken from two translation corpora, the large English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) and the Multilingual Pilot Corpus (MPC) consisting of extracts from Swedish novels and their published translations into English, German, French and Finnish. The study of ta is concerned in particular with the relation between the many concrete uses of the verb, which are based on the interpretation of taking as a goal-directed action sequence. The account of Swedish ge ‘give’ and få ‘get’ are brief summaries of earlier studies concerned with patterns of polysemy and grammaticalization. In particular the verb få ‘get’ has a complex and relatively language-specific such pattern including modal, aspectual and causative grammatical meanings. The meanings GIVE, TAKE, GET and HAVE are all realized as verbs with very high frequency in the Germanic languages. This appears to be a rather language-specific characteristic. The typological part presents a tentative typology and gives a brief overview of some of the ways in which the corresponding meanings are realized in languages that are not included in the corpus.