‘To find oneself a partner’ vs. ‘to find a partner’

Abstract

This paper investigates the patterns V REFL NPindef and V NPindef in an English-Norwegian contrastive perspective. Both languages have a set of verbs that may enter into both patterns, as illustrated in the title by ‘find’ and in Norwegian by finne. On the basis of material drawn from the extended fiction version of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus, it can be established that the two languages operate differently with regard to the frequency and use of the patterns. The investigation focuses on four verbs in particular, pour, ta ‘take’, find and finne ‘find’, with the aim of establishing to what extent the two patterns exist side by side within the two languages, to what extent they are interchangeable in text, and to what extent they correspond to each other cross-linguistically. While the study reveals that they do exist side by side, a more complex picture emerges with regard to how interchangeable they are and to what extent they correspond to each other across the languages. As the patterns as such do not seem to have a uniform meaning, the verb becomes all the more important for the choice of the reflexive vs. the non-reflexive pattern. Cross-linguistically, although the patterns are seen to correspond to each other in some contexts, different preferences emerge for each pattern and verb in the two languages.