The Swedish verb låta ‘let’ from a synchronic and diachronic perspective

Abstract

This paper aims at highlighting the syntactic and semantic variation of the Swedish verb låta ‘let’ from both a synchronic and diachronic point of view. On the basis of corpus data containing Old and Modern Swedish texts from the 13th to the 19th centuries, the syntactic and semantic development of the verb is investigated within the framework of grammaticalization theory.The first part of the paper focuses on the morphosyntactic features of the verb. Considered from a synchronic point of view, the occurrence of låta ‘let’ as a main verb in Contemporary Swedish is limited to a number of more or less fixed expressions, whereas it is much more common as an auxiliary-like verb. However, when considered from a diachronic perspective, it appears that the main verb was much more prevalent a few centuries ago than what it is today.The second part of the paper describes the semantics of the verb. Whereas the semantic profile of the lexical verb låta ‘let’ has become blurred, the auxiliary låta ‘let’ is remarkable in that it covers a scale of meanings ranging from factitive to permissive causation. The study maps the semantic profile of the verb and is concerned with the development of the causative and permissive meanings.The results of the analysis render distinct evidence that the verb has indeed gone through a grammaticalization process.