THE SWEDISH PERIPHRASTIC CONSTRUCTIONS WITH THE VERBS FÅ AND KOMMA

Abstract

The article discusses Swedish periphrastic constructions with the telic verbs få ‘receive’ and komma ‘come’ and the infinitive of verbs that only take animate semantic subjects. In the construction få + infinitive the first element is used only with intransitive verbs and has modal meaning either caused by external factors of possibility (may, be allowed to, be permitted to) and/or necessity (have to). In certain contexts the construction can also have actional meaning of delimitative aktionsart, especially when used with adverbials denoting a short time period: en stund ‘for a while’ and litet ‘a little’. With intransitive verbs of perception se ‘see’, höra ‘hear’, veta ‘know’, känna ‘feel’, erfara ‘learn’, uppleva ‘experience, know’ the verb få loses its modal semantics and becomes a set phraseological unit with ingressive semantics of efficient result. In the construction komma att + infinitive the first component can be used with both transitive and intransitive verbs. Its semantics is based on the meaning of a sudden, unexpected onset of an action which contains temporal and actional features. When used to refer to past events, especially with adverbials sedan ‘afterwards, after that’, senare ‘later’, i framtiden ‘afterwards’, med tiden ‘in [the course of] time’, därefter ‘after that, afterwards’ the construction has a temporal-taxis meaning of sequence. When used with intransitive verbs it can denote inchoative aktionsart, semantically close to the Russian combination of the verb стать ‘become’ with the infinitive; in some contexts the temporal meaning of sequence and the actional inchoative semantics are manifest simultaneously. Used with the verb tänka ‘think’ the construction becomes a set phraseological unit with ingressive semantics: jag kom att tänka ‘it occurred to me, I happened to think of the fact’.