The Polysemous Cognates Swedish gå and English go: Universal and language-specific characteristics

Viberg, Åke

doi:10.1075/lic.2.1.06vib

Article published In: Information Structure in Parallel Texts
Edited by Hilde Hasselgård, Stig Johansson and Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen
[Languages in Contrast 2:1] 1999
► pp. 87–113

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The Polysemous Cognates Swedish gå and English go

Universal and language-specific characteristics

Åke Viberg | University of Lund

Published online: 6 September 2000

https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.2.1.06vib

In spite of the fact that Swedish gå and English go are historically rather closely related in a transparent way, both verbs are translated by their etymological counterpart only in around one third of the cases, as evidenced from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The article compares the patterns of polysemy formed by the major senses of the two cognates in each language against the background of some typological studies

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