Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

116 ÅKE VIBERG
Han slog ihop matsedeln och He closed the menu and wine list,
vinlistan,
When the object means ‘door’, slå preserves more of its basic meaning and
implies that the closing is more violent than normal. In particular, it invites the
inference that the closing results in a loud noise, which is reflected in the
translation equivalent slam:
“När går ni av skiftet ikväll?” ”When do you get off your shift?”
frågade han i samma ögonblick som he asked the one in the back as she
en av dem slog igen bildörren. slammed the car door.
When slå upp is combined with objects of the type ‘book’, the meaning can be
extended further. It can refer to the turning of pages, and the object in this case
refers to some section of a printed document:
Hon slår genast upp Kvinnosidan, She turns at once to the Women’s page,
The extension proceeds one step further when the object refers to the information
that can be found in the document. A conventionalized expression such as
slå upp ett ord ‘look up a word (in a dictionary)’ is based on metonymy. The
following actual example illustrates the same meaning but contains the particle
efter ‘after’ instead of upp:
Han hade på försök slagit efter He had tried looking up The Biggest
“Världens största mage” Stomach in the World
Via these extensions, slå upp covers a large class of nouns in the uses related
to the meaning ‘open’. The previous examples also show that a rather detailed
representation of nouns including a great deal of ‘encyclopedic’ information is
required for the comprehension process
As already mentioned in 5.1, slå upp can also be used with the meaning
‘pour’ when it appears in contexts with nouns referring to liquids and containers.
However, in this use it is rather common that the crucial nouns do not
appear in the same sentence but in the wider context. This is clearly an
exception with slå, but the phenomenon is of great interest since it shows that
it is necessary to extend the analysis beyond the scope of the individual
sentence.
Lindgren skrattar ett låtsasskratt Lindgren laughs an affected laugh
och drar fram en flaska Kronvodka and produces a bottle of Crown vodka
ur ryggsäcken.—Om du inte är snäll, from his rucksack. –If you’re not nice,
så får du inte smaka, säger han och you won’t get any, he says and pours
slår upp åt sig själv innan han låter some for himself before he lets the bottle