Giving in English and Norwegian

Abstract

This chapter investigates ditransitive constructions and their prepositional dative alternates, containing the cognate verbs Englishgiveand Norwegiangi, using data from the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus (Johansson 2007). The bi-directional nature of the corpus enables us not only to compare the distribution of constructions in the original texts in the two languages but also to investigate how individual tokens are translated into the other language. The analysis shows thatgiveconstructions in the two languages are remarkably similar in their semantics and their distribution. There are, however, some differences, including the greater incidence of light verb constructions in English, and a tendency for Norwegian translators to employ agetconstruction with therecipientrecoded as subject rather than indirect/prepositional object.