Transaction verbs: a lexical and semantic analysis of rob and steal

Abstract: The work presented in this D-extended essay has been carried out as part of the project "Linguistics in the Midnight Sun" at the Department of Language and Culture, Luleå University of Technology. The research area chosen for my paper is that of Possession and Transaction. The overall purpose of this paper is to give an introductory description of the Possession domain and to examine the dimensions central to Possession. The lexemes chosen for detailed study, rob and steal, were looked up in six well-known dictionaries. To describe how these lexemes are used in actual speech and writing the British National Corpus (BNC) was used for data collection. Contrasting the definitions in the six dictionaries, the main difference between rob and steal is that steal is used when something is taken secretly from a person, whereas rob is used when something is taken violently from a person or place. For rob, the data from the BNC showed that prototypically the one who robs is a man, the robbed person is a bank and the thing robbed is often money or other valuable objects. In prototypical constructions with steal, the one who steals is a male, the stolen thing is something that belongs to another person and there is a wide mix of people whom it has been stolen from. In non-prototypical constructions with rob or steal, at least one of the dimensions central to the lexeme differs from the prototypical configurations of roles.