1887
Volume 16, Issue 1
  • ISSN 1387-6759
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9897
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

This study compares eleven verbs of letting in six Germanic and five Romance languages. The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the differences and similarities in the semasiological variation of these verbs, both across and within the two language groups they represent. The results of a Multidimensional Scaling analysis based on a parallel corpus of film subtitles show that the verbs differ along several semantic dimensions, such as letting versus leaving, factitive versus permissive causation, as well as modality and discourse function. Although the main differences between the verbs lend themselves to a genealogical interpretation (Germanic vs. Romance), a distributional analysis of constructional patterns in which the verbs occur reveals that these differences are in fact distributed areally, with a centre and a periphery.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/lic.16.1.04lev
2016-01-01
2025-02-14
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/lic.16.1.04lev
Loading
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error