PPs, particles and polysemy of a basic Swedish speech act verb

Författare

Niclas Burenhult

Summary, in English

Every language has a set of verbs which denote the various actions we perform when we communicate through spoken language. In linguistic literature, these are commonly referred to as speech act verbs and they typically include communicative categories like asking, answering, promising,

accusing, telling and a host of others. Most speech act verbs have very specific meanings which limit their usage to narrow communicative contexts and certain specialised categories of the speech act domain. However, the speech act domain also includes a small number of commonly used verbs which may be regarded as more basic, less specialised and more versatile. They appear in a variety of contexts and thus exhibit a more complex pattern of polysemy than other speech act verbs. Typical English examples include say, speak and talk. Based on 4000+ concordances from several corpora of different genres, the present study attempts to chart the polysemy of one such basic speech act verb in Swedish: tala.

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