Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 170
Milli mála 13/2021 169
verb, Partington (1998) also notes the unpleasant nature of its col-
locates. In the context of North Germanic languages, Ebeling
(2014, 167–171) compares English commit with its Norwegian
counterparts using a translation corpus. According to her analysis,
most of the examples of commit correspond to the verb begå ‘commit’
(40 out of 53 cases), followed by utføre ‘perform’, ta ‘take’, and no
correspondence. Ebeling claims that the verb begå primarily takes
negatively loaded collocates, and so the English commit and
Norwegian begå betray similar usage tendencies in terms of seman-
tic prosody. Ebeling shows that begå frequently co-occurs with
nouns relating to a decidedly bad act such as drap ‘manslaughter’,
feil ‘error’, forbrytelse ‘crime’, and mord ‘murder’, but the verb utføre
does not manifest the consistently negative prosody found for begå.
Another well-known example is the adverb utterly, which seems
to be a somewhat less predictable case for native speakers. Louw
(1993, 160–161) consults the original 18-million-word corpus at
Cobuild and finds that many of the collocates to the right of utterly
are unfavourable. Few right-collocates were characterised as good,
and utterly had overwhelmingly bad prosody. This was also sup-
ported by Ebeling’s (2014) investigation. In her corpus, 20 out of
24 instances are clearly associated with unfavourable collocates (p.
173). The word’s Norwegian counterparts show a slightly more
complicated pattern. Ebeling’s study shows that in many instances
there are no Norwegian words corresponding to utterly (9 instances),
but three adverbs, fullstendig ‘completely’ (5), helt ‘completely,
wholly’ (4), and aldeles ‘altogether’, also appear as its Norwegian
counterparts. Ebeling claims that fullstendig seems to match utterly
relatively well in terms of semantic environment and semantic
prosody, whereas helt does not seem to have strong associations with
any particular discourse function (2014, 173–175). Ebeling con-
cludes that there are no stable Norwegian translations of English
utterly, and in such cases translators may decide to omit that portion
of text rather than to use a particular word/phrase of a similar mean-
ing.
YUKI MINAMISAWA