Language contact and language change in the Baltic Sea Region: The use of ditransitive verbs and the prepositions till and åt in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish

This project focuses on language contact between Finnish and Finland Swedish, as well as between Danish and Sweden Swedish.

More specifically, the aim is to study the role of language contact as a possible explanatory factor behind the differences between Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish when it comes to the use of ditransitive verbs and the prepositions åt and till.

It is known from previous research that Finland Swedish construes ditransitive verbs like ge ‘give’ with the preposition åt (ge ngt åt ngn ‘give sth. to sb.’) to a much larger degree than Sweden Swedish.

Sweden Swedish prefers the preposition till (ge ngt till ngn ‘give sth. to sb.’) or the double object construction (ge ngn ngt ‘give sb. sth.’). The purpose of the project is to study when and why these differences between Finland Swedish and Sweden Swedish arose. The project will use naturally occurring corpus data and will result in three studies.

Study 1 will examine the extent to which the constructional behaviour of ditransitive verbs differs between Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish at various stages of history. Study 2 will focus on changes in the semantics of the prepositions till and åt in the two varieties. Finally, Study 3 will address the issue of language contact as an explanatory factor.

The project will produce results that may indicate when the two varieties of Swedish started to diverge, thus contributing with new knowledge on language contact and language change in the Baltic Sea Region.