| dc.description.abstract | This study uses occurrences taken from the English Norwegian Parallel Corpus to contrast the most frequent uses of the Norwegian verb holde and the English verb hold. The objective is to find the degree of similarity (or dissimilarity) between the two lemmas. The first finding is that holde and hold have a relatively low mutual correspondence rate (the rate at which they correspond to each other in the translation). This low rate indicates that they are often not felt to be translation equivalents. A semantic analysis of the verbs shows that that Norwegian holde is more polysemous than English hold. The Norwegian verb has a number of unique meanings that the English verb cannot express as well as meanings that occur much more frequently and with a much wider range of participants. The meaning that represents the most significant difference between the two verbs is the Norwegian sustainment meaning. In these cases, Norwegian holde expresses roughly the same meaning as the English verbs keep, remain, and stay. A similar meaning occurs with English hold as well, but in a much more restricted way. The English verb is more limited in the types of meanings it can express, and in the majority of cases, it expresses the meaning physical contact (similar to carry), a meaning that is also commonly expressed by the Norwegian verb. There are a few meanings that are unique (or at least more prominent) for the English verb, but these are all infrequent. In terms of syntactic behavior, it is clear that Norwegian holde has developed further in the direction of a function word than its English counterpart. It is more typically part of phrases and it more typically exhibits bleaching of meaning (i.e. reduction or loss of semantic content). In extreme cases, the Norwegian verb has become grammaticalized, meaning that it has lost its basic meaning to adopt a grammatical function. Some findings have indicated that the English verb is felt to have stronger inherent meaning than its Norwegian cognate, even when they are used in similar ways. Norwegian holde tends to have more elements around it that help make its meaning clearer. | eng |