| dc.description.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. | sv |
