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In:Cross-linguistic Correspondences: From lexis to genre
Edited by Thomas Egan and Hildegunn Dirdal
[Studies in Language Companion Series 191] 2017
► pp. 121–146

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Chapter 5
locative at seen through its Swedish and Norwegian equivalents

 | Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences
 | Artevelde University College
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.191.05ega
Abstract
At is commonly understood to be one of three basic topological prepositions in English, the other two being in and on. While there are close equivalents in Swedish and Norwegian to both in and on, this is not the case for at. This chapter investigates the choices made by both Swedish and Norwegian translators of physical location predications containing at. It investigates whether the Swedish and Norwegian translation correspondences of the English preposition can aid us in mapping its semantic network. The corpus data for the study comprise all tokens of at coding physical location in the English original fiction texts found in both the English–Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) and the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC). Roughly 25% of these tokens are translated into Swedish and Norwegian by the on preposition (på/på), 25% by the in preposition (i/i) and 25% by the by preposition (vid/ved). Some 12% are translated by other prepositions and the remainder by divergent constructions. The analysis of these translation correspondences leads to the proposal of a semantic network for at.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theory and data
  • 3.Previous studies of at
  • 4.The translation correspondences of at
    • 4.1Tokens translated by vid/ved
    • 4.2Tokens translated by i into both languages
    • 4.3Tokens translated by på into both languages
    • 4.4 At-relations translated by other prepositions into both languages
    • 4.5Where Norwegians are on and Swedes are in
    • 4.6Where Norwegians are in and Swedes are on
  • 5.The five principal types of at-ness
  • 6.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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