Putting Something Somewhere in English and Norwegian: A Contrastive Approach

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of PUT constructions in English and their Norwegian correspondences. It is based on English original texts and English translations in both fictional and non-fictional texts in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. It includes all examples of English put followed by a THEME, encoded as a direct object, and an adverbial, denoting a PATH or GOAL in prototypical examples of the construction coding caused motion events. The study shows that the THEME is a better predictor of Norwegian verb correspondence than PATH or GOAL. An explanation is proposed to explain the marked difference between the number of translations of put by its Norwegian cognate putte and the number of translations of putte by put.