Tracing processes in auxiliarization: Time-sufficiency verbs from a Norwegian-Swedish-English contrastive perspective

Mats Johansson, Lene Nordrum

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook chapterResearchpeer-review

Abstract

This chapter considers the Norwegian verb rekke ('reach') and its English correspondences in a bi-directional translation corpus (ENPC), as well as occurrences of rekke in Norwegian monolingual corpora. We suggest that rekke is undergoing grammaticalization from a concrete lexical spatial verb towards a (semi-)auxiliary that contains a component of time sufficiency, similar to Swedish hinna (Johansson & Nordrum 2016), but that rekke is at an earlier stage in this development. We base this suggestion on the following observations: (1) Swedish hinna was earlier polysemous between space and time, but can only denote time in present-day Swedish. (2) Norwegian rekke is still polysemous between space and time, but seems to always denote time when used as a (semi-)auxiliary. The study contributes to the semantic description of Norwegian rekke, but also has implications for grammaticalization studies as well as for studies of modality.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTime in Languages, Languages in Time
EditorsAnna Cermakova, Thomas Egan, Hilde Hasselgard, Sylvi Rorvik
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company
Pages67-93
Number of pages27
ISBN (Electronic)9789027258960
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Publication series

NameStudies in Corpus Linguistics
Volume101
ISSN (Print)1388-0373

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Studies of Specific Languages

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Tracing processes in auxiliarization: Time-sufficiency verbs from a Norwegian-Swedish-English contrastive perspective'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this