(A)rise and (a)wake : An investigation of two verb pairs

• Main Author: Lakaw, Alexander
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Växjö universitet, Institutionen för humaniora 2008
• Subjects: corpus linguistics; degrammaticalization; grammaticalization; language change; morphology; prefixation; synonymy; semantic prosody; Specific Languages; Studier av enskilda språk
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:vxu:diva-2362

In this corpus-based study, the two verb pairs arise and rise and awake and wake are investigated. The paper focuses on seven research questions that are related to the meanings of the verbs in question, the semantic specialisations of those verbs, and the semantic relation of the specific verb pair constituents. Furthermore, tendencies of language change are investigated, and an attempt is made to generalise over the influence of the prefix a- on those tendencies. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis show that the verbs awake and wake are more synonymous than the verbs arise and rise. It seems as if due to this difference, the two verbs arise and awake are subject to different processes of language change that take their development into different directions. The observations made about the characteristics of the prefix a- that is involved in the two verbs arise and awake are often ambiguous and inconclusive. Therefore, the influence of this prefix on the processes of language change needs to be analysed further by investigating more word pairs distinguished by the absence or presence of the prefix a-.