How the multiple meanings of a word are organized into a system

What is it about?

The highly frequent Swedish verb få 'get' has many meanings that form a pattern that is more or less unique to Swedish and difficult to translate and to learn for second language learners. The article shows how the total set of senses of a word such as få can be organized into a system (the meaning potential) and how the interpretation is affected by surrounding words and the syntactic construction. Data consist of 1,000 occurrences of få in Swedish novels and their translations into English, German, French and Finnish. Since many of the uses of få are unique to Swedish, various types of paraphrases are common and in certain cases the meaning of få is not reflected in the translation (Zero translation). For comparison, it is also shown that the major equivalents of the most frequent verbs in general are used as translations in less than 50% of the cases (e.g. Swedish gå > Enlish go 38%).

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Why is it important?

The verb få has a complex pattern of polysemy including lexical as well as grammatical meanings. The modal, aspectual and causative uses of få belong to types grammatical meanings that have been intensively studied. The present study presents a model of the meaning potential of få (see p. 1454) that shows the relationships between both lexical and grammatical meanings and how the interpretation of få in text is based on an interplay between the meaning potential and syntactic, lexical semantic and pragmatic cues in the context.