1 Crossling20 2005-01-17 Manuscript version The lexical typological profile of Swedish mental verbs Åke Viberg Uppsala University Abstract The lexical typological profile of a language is a crosslinguistically valid characterization of its lexical structure with particular focus on basic features which are language-specific. The paper deals with basic mental verbs in Swedish from this perspective based on data from translation corpora against the background of available information about typological patterns. A brief sketch is given of language-specific characteristics of the nuclear verb se ’see’ which is the primary equivalent of English see but is also frequently used as an equivalent of look used as an activity verb (look at) and as a phenomenon-based verb (e.g. look happy). The extensive pattern of polysemy of the verb känna ’feel’ is dealt with in detail and turns out to have several language-specific characteristics even in comparison with closely related languages such as German and English. Swedish veta is shown to have a more restricted extension beyond its basic meaning than its primary English equivalent know. English in this case appears to represent a more common pattern than Swedish judging from available typological data. A major section is also devoted to the semantic differentiation between the three basic verbs of thinking tänka-tro-tycka which represents one of the major language-specific characteristics of Swedish mental verbs. 1. Introduction 1.1 The lexical typological profile of a language The lexical typological profile of a language is an account of the distinctive character of its lexical structure in relation to other languages based on work in lexical typology and contrastive lexicology. Information about the typological profile is important in understanding processes of language contact, which has always played a prominent role in language change and does so at an accelerating rate due to the globalization of media and to global migration. In particular, the typological profile forms an important background for both theoretical and applied work in fields such as second language acquisition and translation and interpreting. This paper, which deals with basic mental verbs in Swedish, is in several respects a continuation of Viberg (forthc.) which deals with Swedish verbs of motion, posture and possession from a similar perspective. As stated in the earlier paper, the characterization will proceed from general typology with a world-wide scope to a contrastively oriented comparison between Swedish and a selection of genetically and/or areally relatively closely related languages. A central claim with respect to lexical organization is that verbal semantic fields tend to be organized around one or two nuclear verbs, which are typologically unmarked and tend to have the same basic meaning in a wide range of languages (Viberg 1993a, 1994). Some of the most important of the nuclear verbs have meanings such as 'go' (field: Motion), 'make' (Production), 'give', 'take' (Possession), 'say' (Verbal communication), 'see' (Perception), 'know' (Cognition). With respect to the verbs of cognition, the status of ‘think’ was left open in the earlier studies. One of the questions the present paper will address is whether there is a nuclear verb of thinking in Swedish.