Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

POLYSEMY AND DIFFERENTIATION IN THE LEXICON 117
flaskan gå runt samma väg som TV- go around the same way as the thermos.
kannan. Redan innan dom fått ser Even before they’ve been served, Kurt and
Kurt och Göran glada och nöjda Göran look content. –Take a good slug
ut.—Ta ordentligt nu, säger Lindgren now, Lindgren says when Mats pours. As
när Mats slår i. Som för att ge sin if he wanted to give his blessing.
välsignelse.
In spite of this example showing the importance of the wider context, the
major conclusion from the study of slå is that the local linguistic context
makes it possible to determine the interpretation in the majority of cases. With
some other verbs, the situation seems to be different. To what extent it is
possible to use linguistic clues for the interpretation is an empirical question
that must be determined from case to case.
7. Sound source
In Swedish, there are a large number of Sound-source verbs (Viberg 1978)
such as susa ‘sigh’, ’sough’, surra ‘buzz’, mullra ‘rumble’. These verbs have
a characteristic syntactic frame: det ___ prep NP y , where the NP refers to the
source of the sound: Det susar i träden ‘The wind is sighing (lit. it is sighing)
in the trees’, Det surrar i kupan There is a buzzing in the hive.). This frame is
characteristic not only of sounds but of sense impressions in general. Semantically,
the sound-source verbs are distinguished by the shared component:
(FROM(TRAVEL))(SOUND, y).
There is one group of verbs that could best be characterized as a combination
of a physical contact verb and a sound-source verb (see Table 2 for a list).
They are all frequentative, describing a series of repeated events acoustically
and physically. One of these verbs dunka ‘bang, thump’ will be examined a
little more closely. It can appear in the following syntactic frame which is
highly characteristic of slå: Per dunkade Pål i ryggen ‘Per slapped Pål on the
back (to cheer him up)’. As with slå, a certain emotional attitude is strongly
implicated when the verb appears in this frame. The most characteristic parts
of the lexical representation are shown in Table 10.
In spite of the fact that dunka does not occur with very high frequency, it
has a number of extended senses, which are displayed in Table 11. The
idealized examples are based on actual examples from novels. The identification
of the prototypical meaning is problematic. On the one hand, the most
straightforward derivation of extended senses is obtained if the use as a