This paper discusses co-events denoted by verbs used in Swedish motion events. The motion events are analyzed as constructions in the sense of construction grammar, in which the motion component can be argued to be evoked by a syntactic construction rather than by the verb per se. The manner of motion aspect of motion events has been extensively explored in typological research. The purpose of the paper is to give an overview of co-events often neglected in this research on motion events. Based on empirical findings in large corpora, this paper also focuses on co-event relations other than manner, such as concomitant activities, concurrent results, predicatives and modality. © 2022 Human Cognitive Processing. All rights reserved.

The productivity of syntactic constructions is often measured by the number of different verbs used in the verb slot, i.e. the type frequency of the construction.

This article investigates 17 double-adverbial motion constructions and their occurrence in a large corpus of blogs.

The study shows that there is a difference between the constructions in both token and type fre- quency, as well as with regard to the number of rare and non-motion types used in the construc- tions. For instance, a construction such as the [VERB-runt-i] ‘verb-about-in’ occurs with 225 different verbs even though the overall token frequency of the construction is intermediate, while the [VERB-ner-till] ‘verb-down-to’ construction only occurs with 107 verbs, even though the construction itself is more common. This indicates that the former construction appears to be more produc- tive than the latter.

The study also shows that the productivity of Swedish motion constructions shows up even more clearly if we apply more refined frequency measurements than only raw type frequency, such as the number of types without a conventionalized motion meaning, as well as the number of con- struction-unique types, i.e. types occurring in only one of the constructions investigated. For instance, non-motion verbs like skoja ‘joke’, and spexa ‘clown about’ are exclusively found in the [VERB-runt-på] construction, while animal verbs like snigla ‘snail’ and älga ‘moose’ are mainly found in the [VERB-iväg-till].