?Bollen susade in i bortre gaveln? - En studie i rörelsekonstruktioner och produktivitet
This paper investigates the grammatical construction intransitive motionconstruction with GOAL as it is used in Swedish (Swe. intransitivrörelsekonstruktion med MÅL).I examine in which ways the construction is productive, i.e. thepossibility to use the construction with new verbs as well as withordinary motion verbs with new functions. The notion of productivity isbased on the construction?s type frequency and semantic openness(Goldberg 1995, 2006; Barðdal 2008; Bybee 2010). If we witness manydifferent types of verbs in the construction, it?s highly likely that we willalso use it with new verbs.The investigation is based on a corpus-study, which gave 3569 hits,with a type frequency of 163 verbs from 13 verb classes.The results show that it?s possible to use a variety of verbs in theconstruction, primarily through metaphorical uses of the verb, or ametaphorical use of the whole construction. Besides the expectedmotion verbs (e.g. springa ?run? or krypa ?crawl?), semanticallydifferent verbs such as mingla ?mingle?, susa ?whistle?, kika ?peep?,flumma ?hang around doing nothing? and so on are used as motion verbsin the construction. These verbs don?t have any sense of motion in theirlexical meaning; the motion is therefore something that is assumed tocome from the verb?s fusion with the construction. This indicates thatthe construction is more or less productive, at least in some verb classes.