Fokus på föra : Om svenska funktionsverbsfrasers semantik och valens, med särskild utgångspunkt i verbet föra

Sammanfattning: Functional verb structures, e.g. to have a break, to take into account, consist of a functional verb and an abstract noun (in a nominal phrase, NP, or a prepositional phrase, PP). The purpose of this thesis is to test whether three of the most central claims about these structures apply to Swedish functional verb structures with the verb föra. According to the first claim, the functional verb has lost most of its “original” meaning. In order to test this claim, a semantic analysis of the verb föra is presented. The analysis is based on the network model of meaning. It is suggested that the functional verb doesn’t “lose” meaning, but rather that meaning is partially suppressed as a result of restrictions governing domain-mapping within a metaphor. According to the second claim, nouns in functional verb structures do not take attributes. It is to be expected that this claim will be proven wrong because nouns in functional verb structures are predicates that have arguments and these appear as attributes on the syntactic level. In order to test the second claim, a corpus of functional verb structures with the verb föra has been collected. The valency of all the nouns in the functional verb structures within the corpus has been analysed. The analysis shows that most of these nouns have arguments that appear as attributes.The third claim states that the noun in a functional verb structure cannot change from singular to plural or from indefinite to definite form. This claim seems to apply only to functional verb structures with PP. It is suggested that the reason why functional verb structures with NP and PP differ in this respect lies in the way these different structures express aktionsart. The only way for a functional verb structure with NP to change aktionsart from unbounded to bounded is by changing the form of the NP. Functional verb structures with PP always express bounded aktionsart. The form of the PP has no impact on the aktionsart of the structure, there is therefore no need for the PP to change its form.