”Bollen susade in i bortre gaveln” - En studie i rörelsekonstruktioner och produktivitet

Abstract

This paper investigates the grammatical construction intransitive motion construction with GOAL as it is used in Swedish (Swe. intransitiv rörelsekonstruktion med MÅL). I examine in which ways the construction is productive, i.e. the possibility to use the construction with new verbs as well as with ordinary motion verbs with new functions. The notion of productivity is based on the construction’s type frequency and semantic openness (Goldberg 1995, 2006; Barðdal 2008; Bybee 2010). If we witness many different types of verbs in the construction, it’s highly likely that we will also use it with new verbs. The investigation is based on a corpus-study, which gave 3569 hits, with a type frequency of 163 verbs from 13 verb classes. The results show that it’s possible to use a variety of verbs in the construction, primarily through metaphorical uses of the verb, or a metaphorical use of the whole construction. Besides the expected motion verbs (e.g. springa ‘run’ or krypa ‘crawl’), semantically different verbs such as mingla ’mingle’, susa ’whistle’, kika ’peep’, flumma ’hang around doing nothing’ and so on are used as motion verbs in the construction. These verbs don’t have any sense of motion in their lexical meaning; the motion is therefore something that is assumed to come from the verb’s fusion with the construction. This indicates that the construction is more or less productive, at least in some verb classes.