| dc.description.abstract | The present study compares and contrasts the most frequent uses of the Norwegian verb gi and the English verb give, drawing on material from the English-Norwegian parallel Corpus The aim of the study is to uncover similarities and differences between the verbs and attempt to estimate the degree to which they differ and/or compare, and how they correspond to each other. This is done through a three-part analysis of equivalence, semantic meaning, and grammatical form. Their mutual correspondence rate (i.e., their degree of correspondence in translation between English and Norwegian) was found to be relatively low, which indicates that they are not as equivalent as one might think. Gi more often translates into give than give translates into gi. In terms of meaning, a semantic analysis shows that give is more polysemous than gi. Both verbs have developed diverging meaning extensions, but there are more of them in give than in gi. The semantic category ‘Possession’ is the one in which the verbs behave most similarly, not only in terms of frequency of occurrence, but also in terms of the meanings they express. In particular, it is the language-specific meaning extensions that the verbs have that result in non-correspondence between the two in translation. As for grammatical context, both verbs are found to have phrasal uses, albeit distributed differently in terms of semantic category. While both verbs use particles to form multi-word units, gi also uses the reflexive pronoun to form phrasal units. Give is found to be more semantically bleached than gi, and more often features as part of light verb constructions than gi does; these forms exhibit little semantic content in the verb. Conversely, gi displays more fully phrasal forms in the meanings that do not overlap with give, some of which convey the inchoative aspect, which indicates that gi has developed diverging meaning extensions, although not to the extent of its English counterpart. While these verbs are cognates, the present study finds that they have developed divergent polysemies (Altenberg and Granger 2002) as well as divergent syntactic patterning. In other words, they seem to have taken different directions both in terms of form and meaning, while still retaining their status as synonyms in their prototypical meaning of possession to a large degree. | eng |