Neutrala substantiv på -ande i text och ordbok

Abstract

This thesis presents an examination of Swedish deverbal neutral nouns with the suffix -ande in a corpus of texts from the 1900s and early 2000s, compared to the presentation of these deverbal nouns in three modern, monolingual Swedish dictionaries. The aim of this dual study is to situate the usage of -ande nouns within a lexicographical perspective.

In the corpus study, I examine deverbal nouns ending with -ande and their frequency in several different genres, including news texts, academic texts, novels, and online blogs. The most frequent -ande nouns (included in five different sub-corpora) are further examined with regard to their semantics and contextual properties. The corpus study shows that academic texts display the highest relative frequency of nouns ending in -ande and blog texts the lowest frequency. The specialized corpus studies show that highly frequent -ande-derivatives often display polysemy, and that they may be combined with several different adjectives, depending on each sub-sense, respectively.

Regarding the dictionaries used in this study, I investigate deverbal neutral nouns with the suffix -ande and their lexicographical realization on three structural levels: (i) in the prefatory texts of each dictionary, (ii) in the set of headwords, and (iii) in the entry texts. The dictionaries investigated are Bonniers svenska ordbok (BSO 2010), Svenska Akademiens ordlista över svenska språket (SAOL 14, 2015), and Svensk ordbok utgiven av Svenska Akademien (SO 2009). The results of this investigation show that SAOL 14 contains considerably more words ending with -ande in its list of headwords than the other two dictionaries. BSO 2010 treats many of its headwords that end with -ande as a kind of mixed category. The words are listed, but a semantic description is not always provided. In contrast, SO 2009 lists a majority of the -ande derivatives in the article text that accompanies the root verb.

The results from the combined investigations show that the most highly frequent words display varied contexts in the corpora, something that is not always picked up by the dictionaries. Another result is that polysemous -ande words, and -ande words that form the basis of certain phrases, are to a great extent represented in the dictionaries.

In light of the corpus investigations, I argue that all three dictionaries could be more consistent in their treatment of derived words. The semantic descriptions and the formal and contextual descriptions presented in these dictionaries may also benefit from a more ‘usage-based’ revision. I also identify considerable differences between the print dictionaries and the electronic versions produced by individual publishers.