Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2007
Abstract
This paper observes the Swedish auxiliary verb "hålla på", commonly used as a progressivity marker in pseudocoordination with a process verb. In some contexts, especially in combination with negation, "hålla på" gives the process denoted by the lexical verb a flavour of constancy.
The corpus evidence proves that this semantic feature is spreading onto non-negated contexts, too, which implies that the auxiliary construction "hålla på och" is becoming polysemous. This interesting semantic shift is related to Hopper's (1987) idea of grammaticalization regarded as "movement towards structure" as well as to the concept of "context-induced reinterpretation" as one type of semantic shifting described by Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer (1991).