Re-thinking THINK in contrastive perspective: Swedish vs. English

Abstract

Swedish and English differ in interesting ways in relation to how they express semantic prime THINK and related concepts. At first, it is not even obvious that there is a good Swedish exponent of THINK, because many uses of English think correspond not with Swedish tänka 'think', but with either 'tro' (roughly) 'be of the opinion that' or 'tycka' (very roughly) 'feel that'. We argue that English 'think' and Swedish tänka are in fact precise semantic equivalents in canonical NSM contexts, and we show how 'tro' and 'tycka', which we term "epistemic verbs", can be explicated in terms of semantic prime THINK (Tänka) and other elements. We also argue that English 'think' has certain complex, i.e. non-primitive uses, namely the "opinion" frame (e.g. 'She thinks that' - -) and the conversational formula 'I think', and we explicate these English-specific constructions. All the explications are presented in parallel English and Swedish versions. The contrastive exercise makes it clear that in universal grammar THINK can take a propositional complement (i.e. 'think that - -') only when it depicts an "occurrent thought" anchored to a particular time.