The Norwegian posture verb stå : a Norwegian-English-Italian contrastive study

Abstract

The Norwegian posture verb stå [English equivalent of stand] is among the most frequently used verbs in Norwegian. It is polysemous and is used in a wide range of contexts. Although it most frequently denotes the position or posture of someone or something, it also has other uses; it is, for instance, used instead of ‘be’ or to indicate an on-going event. The fact that it is used in so many different contexts makes it interesting to compare its use with other languages. This thesis examines stå in Norwegian original fictional texts and its translations into English and Italian, drawing on material from ten texts in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus and from four Norwegian novels and their Italian translations. The meanings of stå and its translations are organized according to Halliday’s verb processes. Three main analysis chapters deal with stå as a simple verb, in pseudocoordination and in multiword lexemes. The English cognate stand was found to be used similarly to stå in many contexts and is the most frequent translation of stå. However, there are numerous examples where stå does not correspond to stand; the second most frequent English translation of stå is be. The Italian language has no direct equivalent to stå; thus, several verbs may translate it. The most common Italian translations in the material are essere/esserci [English be] and zero correspondence [no element translates the meaning of stå]. The high frequency of ‘be’ in both English and Italian translations suggests that Norwegian uses stå similarly to a copula or “grammatical” verb. In general, the findings suggest that there is a typological difference between Norwegian and Italian. In Italian there is rarely focus on posture, which may thus be unspecified, whereas Norwegian frequently focuses on posture.