Such and sådan – the same but different

Abstract

English such has a variety of uses, which nearly always involve the expression of similarity, and such can therefore be called a ʻsimilativeʼ. Swedish sådan has very similar uses. However, the two similatives differ strongly with respect to the frequency of some of these uses. Thus such, different from sådan, rarely functions as a noun or pronoun, compared to sådan it more frequently exhibits the so-called ʻintensifying useʼ and it has more competition from constructions with like, sort and kind (sort, typ in Swedish). The study uses three methods: (i) non-corpus analysis based on intuition, scrutiny of existing scholarship and google searches, (ii) analyis of comparable corpora, and (iii) analysis of parallel corpora.