Phenomenon-Based Perception Verbs in Swedish from a Typological and Contrastive Perspective

Prototypical meaning
SEEM + SOUND
SEEM
BE
SOUND, 
N
Other 
expres-
sions
Swedish låta
170
English sound
143
seem
4 be
5
6
12
German klingen 
sich anhören
119 
15
wirken
4 sein 5
5
22
Finnish kuulostaa
134
tuntua
6 olla 7
4
19
French
sonner
7
paraître 
sembler
24 
12
être 22
16
89
The lack of a direct equivalent in French motivates concentrating 
on that language. Table 10 (p. 38) shows how the French translations 
are distributed across the complements of låta. The top row shows the 
frequency of the complements of copulative Swedish låta. The use with 
an adjective or participle as complement (_ADJ) dominates strongly, 
followed by the use with som as a marker of comparison in combination 
with a noun / NP (_som N).
Apart from the fact that avoir l’air has a much lower frequency, 
the French translation pattern of låta is similar to the one of se ut. The 
most frequent translations of låta in the context _ADJ are paraître 
“seem”, être “be” and sembler “seem”, all of which lack any reference 
to a sense modality. It is also the case that these three translations 
primarily are used in the context _ADJ. Avoir l’air, which is the most 
frequent translation of the visual sensory copula se ut, also appears as 
a translation, but only 5 times.
The auditory copula has several functions. It can be used to describe 
acoustic properties of a sound as in (19).
© Presses universitaires de Caen | Téléchargé le 11/03/2023 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 213.230.72.251)

---

— 38 —
Åke Viberg
19. Rösten lät skrovligare än hon önskat. (MPC: LM)
Her voice sounded rougher than she would have wanted.
Ihre Stimme klang rauher als gewollt.
Ääni kuulosti käheämmältä kuin hän olisi toivonut.
Sa voix était plus rauque qu’elle ne l’aurait voulu.
Table 10. French translations of copulative låta across different types of complements