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Re-thinking THINK: contrastive semantics of English and Swedish
Semester II 2003
(Footlights seminar room, 28 July 2003, 12.00 noon)
Abstract
Do different languages embody different ways of thinking about
'thinking' itself? To what extent are our ideas about cognition
shaped or conditioned by the fact that our native language happens to
be English? This paper compares the lexical semantics of 'thinking'
and related epistemic verbs in English and Swedish, starting with the
fact that in different contexts the English verb think has to be
translated by three different Swedish verbs -
tänka, tro, tycka. For this reason it is often said
that Swedish and other Scandinavian languages "divide up the semantic
space" of cognition differently to English.
I will argue that there is in fact a precise semantic match-up
between the primary senses of Swedish tänka
and English think, which both correspond to universal
semantic prime THINK as proposed
by Anna Wierzbicka. This finding can only emerge, however, after
various language-specific peculiarities both English and Swedish have
been explicated, including (for English) the use of think for
stating "opinions" and the status of I think as a conversational
formula; and (for Swedish) the meanings of the epistemic verbs
tro and tycka, which indeed have no precise
equivalents in English. Overall, the differences between the languages
are as interesting and as significant as the similiarities.
