A corpus-based contrastive study of the cognates set-sette

Abstract

The present thesis is a corpus-based contrastive study. It examines the cognate verbs set and sette in English and Norwegian fiction original texts and their translations. The cognates set and sette are both relatively frequent verbs which express different meanings in various syntactic and contextual environments. The research seeks to investigate potential semantic differences in English and Norwegian translations, to find out to what degree set and sette correspond to each other and what semantic meanings set and sette gain in context. The study follows Viberg’s investigation of Swedish-English verb pairs (1996), (1998), (1999b) and (2002). Viberg’s studies, Levin’s classification of English verb classes (1993) and Gronemeyer’s work (1999) serve as the sources of establishing of the semantic meanings for analyzing set-sette. The thesis is based on the syntactic and semantic analysis of the verbs in question. The syntactic categories established in two chapters of the thesis constitute the starting point for identifying and analyzing the semantic categories of set and sette in two other chapters which deal with semantic analysis of the cognate verbs. The study shows that a wide variety of semantic meanings which set and sette gain is favoured by various translation correspondences, syntactic environment and context. The investigation results show that strikingly complex polysemies of set and sette partly overlap. They show both absence and presence of the certain semantic categories and a gap in frequencies.