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NTNU, LING1133 (2009) - Directionality in Norwegian

Direction or perhaps better Directionality is a relational concept which encodes at least two parameters - 'away from a reference object' and ' towards a reference object'. Linguists have distinguished 'projective direction' from 'absolute direction' where absolute directions is mostly in the vertical space (up and down; yet the latter is of course in reality also projective directions with a very, very large reference object (Earth).

As part of speech direction is usually encoded in one of three different ways in Norwegian: as a verb, as a preposition or as a combination of these. Here are some examples:

Towards referential object:

mot

komme

til

hit

hitover

herover

Away from referential object:

dra/fare

stikke

fra

dit

Up

opp

stige

Down

ned

synke


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