Nouns on fire in Mainland Scandinavian A lexico-typological study of selected nouns referring to FIRE in Danish, Norwegian (Bokmål) and Swedish Carolina Lindmark Department of Linguistics Independent Project for the Degree of Master 30 HEC Master’s program in language sciences – specialization in typology and linguistic diversity Autumn term 2017 Supervisor: Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm Expert reviewer: Henrik Liljegren Examiner: Bernhard Wälchli Nouns on fire in Mainland Scandinavian A lexico-typological study of selected nouns referring to FIRE in Danish, Norwegian (bokmål) and Swedish Carolina Lindmark Abstract The current study investigates the use of a selected group of nouns in the domain of FIRE in written Mainland Scandinavian languages, i.e. Danish, Norwegian (bokmål) and Swedish. The main goal is to capture the semantic features of the nouns by examining typical situations where they occur, following the frame-method for lexical studies by Rakhilina & Reznikova (2016). The nouns are examined in terms of their combinatorial patterning in compounds with other nouns, in trigrams and in figurative use. The synchronic data is drawn from corpora, lexica and first speaker intuition. Four parameters are formulated, which seem to play a role in the lexical use among the fire words, in the three languages. The nouns are structured according to the parameters and each lexeme displays combinatorial pattern revealing semantic restrictions. The selected ‘fire nouns’ are fairly similar, but differ in terms of semantic load most prominently among the lexemes that refer to controllable fires. The lexemes relevant for the parameter of ‘subcomponents of fire processes’ display an asymmetry, which needs to be studied further. The scope of the current study also includes two lexemes in Swedish that semantically have not been possible to disentangle. On the whole, at least the controllability of the fire is lexically encoded, possibly because that property is crucial for survival. Keywords Typology, semantics, lexical typology, lexical frames, fire, nouns, compounds, parameters Fatta eld i fastlandsskandinaviska språk En lexikal-typologisk undersökning av utvalda substantiv som refererar till ELD på danska, norska (bokmål) och svenska Carolina Lindmark Sammanfattning Denna studie är en deskriptiv undersökning av en grupp substantiv inom ELD-domänen i fastlandsskandinaviska språk: danska, norska (bokmål) och svenska. Syftet är att beskriva substantivens semantiska drag genom att studera typiska situationer där de förekommer, i linje med den så kallade ”frame-metoden” som utarbetats av Rakhilina & Reznikova (2016) särskilt ämnad för lexikala studier. Substantiven undersöks utifrån hur de kan kombineras i sammansättningar med andra substantiv, i trigram och i figurativa användningar. Den synkrona datan hämtas från korpusar, lexikon och förstaspråkstalares intuition. De fyra parametrar som formuleras verkar ha relevans för de lexikala användningarna av de olika ”eld-orden” i de tre språken. Orden är strukturerade efter parametrarna och varje lexem har ett eget mönster för kombinationer i sammansättningar sina egna mönster, vilket visar på deras semantiska restriktioner. De utvalda orden är semantiskt relativt lika varandra och de olikheter som observeras framgår tydligast bland orden som refererar till någon slags kontrollerbar eld. De ord som kan beskrivas med parametern ”delkomponent av eldar som processer” uppvisar en asymmetri som behöver utforskas vidare. I urvalet finns även två svenska lexem som semantiskt sett inte har gått att skilja åt i denna uppsats. Generellt verkar åtminstone eldens kontrollerbarhet vara lexikalt kodad, antagligen eftersom den är livsviktig för vår överlevnad. Nyckelord Typologi, semantic, lexikal typologi, lexikala ramar, eld, substantiv, sammansättningar, parametrar Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................ 1 2. Background ......................................................................................... 3 2.1 Basic assumptions ........................................................................................ 3 2.2 Theoretical framework of lexical typology ........................................................ 3 2.3 Previous studies focusing on the FIRE domain .................................................. 4 2.4 Mainland Scandinavian languages ................................................................... 5 3. Aims and research questions .............................................................. 8 4. Method .............................................................................................. 10 4.1 Choice of data sources ................................................................................ 10 4.2 Data ......................................................................................................... 10 4.3 Procedure .................................................................................................. 11 4.3.1 Compilation of lexemes from dictionaries ................................................. 12 4.3.2 Extraction of concordances from corpora .................................................. 14 4.4 Data processing and analysis ....................................................................... 16 4.4.1 Manual analysis and revision of files in Excel ............................................ 16 4.4.2 Using a script in Python to extract trigrams .............................................. 19 4.5 Semantic maps to visualize linguistic variation ................................................ 20 4.6 Method discussion ...................................................................................... 22 4.6.1 Advantages and disadvantages regarding data ......................................... 22 4.6.2 Advantages and disadvantages regarding procedure .................................. 23 5. Results .............................................................................................. 26 5.1 Examined fire words ................................................................................... 26 5.2 Words referring to fire in general: (Da) ild, (No) ild, (Sw) eld ........................... 26 5.2.1 (Da) ild, (No) ild, (Sw) eld in compounds ................................................. 27 5.2.2 (Da) ild, (No) ild, (Sw) eld in trigrams ..................................................... 28 5.2.3 (Da) ild, (No) ild, (Sw) eld in figurative use .............................................. 29 5.2.4 Summary of (Da) ild, (No) ild, (Sw) eld ‘fire’ ............................................ 31 5.3 Relevant parameters to describe the lexemes ................................................. 31 5.4 Semantic map of fire words ......................................................................... 33 5.5 Words referring to uncontrollable fire ............................................................ 35 5.5.1 Words referring to uncontrollable fire in compounds .................................. 35 5.5.2 Words referring to uncontrollable fire in trigrams ...................................... 37 5.5.3 Words referring to uncontrollable fire in figurative use ............................... 38 5.5.4 Summary of words referring to uncontrollable fires ................................... 39 5.6 Words referring to controllable fire ................................................................ 40 5.6.1 Words referring to controllable fire in compounds ...................................... 42 5.6.2 Words referring to controllable fire in trigrams .......................................... 46 5.6.3 Words referring to controllable fire in figurative use ................................... 47 5.6.4 Summary of words referring to controllable fires ....................................... 48 5.7 Words referring to subcomponents of the above-described words that denote fire processes ....................................................................................................... 49 5.7.1 Subcomponents of fire processes in compounds ........................................ 50 5.7.2 Subcomponents of fire processes in trigrams ............................................ 51 5.7.3 Subcomponents of fire processes in figurative use ..................................... 52 5.7.4 Summary of words referring to subcomponents of fire processes ................. 55 5.8 Summary of identified patterns of the fire words ............................................. 55 6. Discussion ......................................................................................... 57 6.1 Discussion of results ................................................................................... 57 6.2 Discussion of methodology .......................................................................... 59 6.3 Suggestions for future research .................................................................... 59 7. Conclusion ........................................................................................ 61 References ............................................................................................ 62 Appendices ............................................................................................... 1. Introduction 1 The current study intends to capture the use of nouns in the domain of FIRE in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish in synchronic data. The starting point is ild (Da, No) or eld (Sw) ‘fire’, a Germanic word whose origin is mysterious (Wessén 1960), and