Seem and Appear and Their Norwegian Verbal Counterparts: A Cross-Register Contrastive Study

Abstract

Verbs such as seem and appear combine features of evidential meaning with epistemic modality. This study takes a corpus-based, contrastive view of such verbs in Norwegian and English. It investigates the frequencies, patterns and meanings of seem, appear and their Norwegian correspondences virke, synes and se ut in English fiction and academic prose. Both similarities and differences are found across languages and registers. Appear and synes are clearly more frequent in academic prose and can therefore be characterised as more formal. Of all the verbs investigated, seem has the greatest syntactic flexibility. The Norwegian verbs show more syntactic variation across lexemes than the English verbs do. The English verbs are arguably more grammaticalised in their evidential meanings: they occur more regularly with catenative function, and are also complemented directly by NPs and nominal clauses rather than by PPs and adverbial clauses, which is often the pattern of the Norwegian verbs.