Nouns on fire in Mainland Scandinavian : A lexico-typological study of selected nouns referring to FIRE in Danish, Norwegian (Bokmål) and Swedish

Abstract: The current study investigates the use of a selected group of nouns in the domain of FIRE in written Mainland Scandinavian languages, i.e. Danish, Norwegian (bokmål) and Swedish. The main goal is to capture the semantic features of the nouns by examining typical situations where they occur, following the frame-method for lexical studies by Rakhilina & Reznikova (2016). The nouns are examined in terms of their combinatorial patterning in compounds with other nouns, in trigrams and in figurative use. The synchronic data is drawn from corpora, lexica and first speaker intuition. Four parameters are formulated, which seem to play a role in the lexical use among the fire words, in the three languages. The nouns are structured according to the parameters and each lexeme displays combinatorial pattern revealing semantic restrictions. The selected ‘fire nouns’ are fairly similar, but differ in terms of semantic load most prominently among the lexemes that refer to controllable fires. The lexemes relevant for the parameter of ‘subcomponents of fire processes’ display an asymmetry, which needs to be studied further. The scope of the current study also includes two lexemes in Swedish that semantically have not been possible to disentangle. On the whole, at least the controllability of the fire is lexically encoded, possibly because that property is crucial for survival.