Bitransitivt bruk av verbet gora

The study investigates change in the use of the verb göra ‘make, do’ in the double object construction (DOC) and prepositional object constructions (POCs) with till and åt in Sweden Swed-ish and Finland Swedish prose fiction texts between 1800 and 1999. In both the Sweden Swedish and the Finland Swedish data, the use of göra in the DOC decreases in text frequency and in lexical richness (i.e. the number of nouns available as direct object). In the Sweden Swedish data, the use of POCs increases in the second half of the twentieth century. No such increase was found in the Finland Swedish data. In the nineteenth century, göra occurs mainly in the DOC as a light verb with abstract direct objects in both Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish, and only occasionally appears as a verb of creation with concrete direct objects. The decrease of göra in the DOC is concomitant with a general decrease in the use of göra as a light verb. In Sweden Swedish, göra in the åt-POC and till-POC is increasingly associated with concrete direct objects. The increase of the POCs in Sweden Swedish indicates that göra is more frequently used as a default verb of creation. The preposition åt is generally considered a “Finland-ism”, being more frequent in Finland Swedish than in Sweden Swedish. The results of the study indicate no such tendency. It is possible that the scarcity of POCs in the late twentieth century Finland Swedish texts is due to the fact that Finland Swedish authors try to avoid Finlandisms.