How we talk about talk in English and Swedish

What is it about?

A very large number of verbs are used to talk about talk, but the four verbs say, tell, talk and speak account for a large proportion of the total numer of such verbs in English. Frequent verbs tend to have very general meanings that are hard to define and that do not correspond one-to-one across languages. The Swedish verb berätta, for example, is frequently translated into English by tell, whereas tell most frequently is translated into Swedish by the general verb säga 'say'. The frequency of tell is also significantly lower in English texts that have been translated from Swedish than in original English texts.

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Why is it important?

Frequent verbs that lack correspondences or that correspond in complex ways across languages tend to represent problems for translation and for second language learners.