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The directed motion construction in Swedish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2002

IDA TOIVONEN
IDA TOIVONEN
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
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Abstract

This paper introduces a Swedish construction, called THE DIRECTED MOTION CONSTRUCTION (DMC). The DMC is parallel to the English WAY construction, which has recently received considerable attention in a debate comparing constructions to lexical rules. The DMC is very productive, and must therefore be taken seriously by any grammatical theory. This paper gives a detailed description of the DMC, and formalizes it in two ways: as a construction and as a lexical rule. Although both formalizations are possible, the construction more straightforwardly captures the most interesting aspect of the DMC: the fact that the overall meaning cannot be tied to any one of its individual parts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , July 2002 , pp. 313 - 345
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank audiences at the SKY Symposium in Helsinki (August 1999) and at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (April 2000), and also at Gothenburg, Lund and Manchester Universities for helpful suggestions. In addition, I want to thank Joan Bresnan, Adele Goldberg, Ray Jackendoff, Paul Kiparsky, Beth Levin, Joan Maling, Jeff Runner, Peter Sells and, especially, Ash Asudeh for providing many insightful comments on several drafts of this manuscript. Finally, I want to thank two anonymous JL referees. The comments I have received have greatly improved this work, but I, of course, take full responsibility for all the remaining imperfections, errors and misunderstandings.