This is an article posted in the open Access journal Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES) . The original article can be found here: http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/njes/article/view/3087This paper presents a contrastive study of Norwegian predications of motion events with
the compound prepositions ut av (‘out of’) and inn i (‘into’) and their translations into
English and French. The motivation for choosing these two types of predication is that
French, unlike English, is said to avoid the use of manner verbs with boundary-crossing
events. The paper examines all occurrences in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus (OMC) of
self-motion predications containing the two Norwegian prepositions, in all of which path
is coded in the prepositional phrase. The verb may also code path, it may code manner, or
it may be a neutral verb of movement. We first analyse the Norwegian originals with
respect to their coding of path and manner and then turn to the two sets of translations
and investigate the extent to which they retain the manner/path coding choices of the
source predications and, if not, what sort of alterations they make. If the contention that
French avoids manner verbs with boundary-crossing actions is correct, the French
translations should exhibit a much greater degree of path or neutral motion coding in the
verb than either the Norwegian originals or the English translations. The data show that
this is indeed the case. There are also, however, more occurrences of manner verbs in
French with boundary-crossing actions than one would expect given the language’s
reputation in the literature for avoiding this construction
