Putting Something Somewhere in English and Norwegian: A Contrastive Approach

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of PUTconstructions in English and their Norwegian correspondences. It is based on English original texts and English translations in both fictional and non-fictional texts in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. It includes all examples of English putfollowed by a THEME, encoded as a direct object, and an adverbial, denoting a PATH orGOALin prototypical examples of the construction coding caused motion events. The study shows that the THEMEis a better predictor of Norwegian verb correspondence than PATH orGOAL. An explanation is proposed to explain the marked difference between the number of translations of putby its Norwegian cognate putteand the number of translations of putteby put