Physical contact verbs in English and Swedish from the perspective of crosslinguistic lexicology

The major English physical contact verbs strike, hit and beat are compared with their primary Swedish translation equivalent sla on the basis of data from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The analysis is carried out within two theoretical frameworks concerning the underlying conceptual representation and the linguistic cues that can be used for word sense identification. In addition to a rather detailed account of points of contrast in the fairly extensive patterns of polysemy that are characteristic of the verbs, an attempt is made to provide a general characterisation in contrastive terms. In comparison with the English verbs, the conceptual representation of sla is grounded more firmly in sensorimotor experience and the fact that hitting prototypically is a hand action. As in other languages such as Chinese, the main verb of hitting in Swedish has extended senses that refer to other types of hand actions. With respect to word sense identification, the semantic classification of the subject and object is a prominent cue for the distinction between the major meanings of the main physical contact verbs but to various degrees in English and Swedish. Several examples are also given of cases where linguistic cues are not sufficient and disambiguation must be based on topical or pragmatic information.