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Academic Paper

Title:	The directed motion construction in Swedish
Author:	Ida Toivonen
Email:	click here to access email
Homepage:	http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/people/toivonen.shtml
Institution:	Carleton University
Linguistic Field:	Syntax
Subject Language:	Swedish
Abstract:	This paper introduces a Swedish construction, called THE DIRECTED MOTION CONSTRUCTION (DMC). The DMC is parallel to the English WAY construction, which has recently received considerable attention in a debate comparing constructions to lexical rules. The DMC is very productive, and must therefore be taken seriously by any grammatical theory. This paper gives a detailed description of the DMC, and formalizes it in two ways: as a construction and as a lexical rule. Although both formalizations are possible, the construction more straightforwardly captures the most interesting aspect of the DMC: the fact that the overall meaning cannot be tied to any one of its individual parts.

	This article appears in Journal of Linguistics Vol. 38, Issue 2, which you can read on Cambridge's site .

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