"veta om" and other phrasal (?) verbs in Swedish

[harisont]

There are several cases in which I find it difficult to decide whether a verb is phrasal or not and looking at the existing treebanks only helps up to a certain point.

For example, the verb "veta" followed by the form "om" can be used in at least three ways (the examples are from Talbanken and LinES):

1. veta + om + clause, e.g. "då får du möjligen veta om båda strålkastarna lyser": for me, these cases are clearly not phrasal and "om" is a SCONJ, but not all examples in LinES agree (cf. sv_lines-ud-train-doc6-2010)
2. veta + om + nominal, e.g. "kanske till och med vetat om det i förväg". For cases like this, I found:
   • LinES: compound:prt(veta, om) + obj(veta, NOMINAL), I was surprised by this, but I see the point)
   • Talbanken:
     • obl(veta, NOMINAL) + case(NOMINAL, om) (also makes sense to me, and it even matches the English "know about NOMINAL"
     • nmod(veta, NOMINAL) + case(NOMINAL, om) (only in sv-ud-train-2580; I believe this is an annotation error)
3. veta + om + att + clause, e.g. "Stillman visste om att han var skuggad". This only appears in LinES and is annotated as
   • compound:prt(veta, om) + ccomp(veta, CLAUSE) (coherent with case 2 in LinES).

I should also add that:

• there is a "veta om" entry in SO (but not in SAOL) and that it links to "känna till" (which is phrasal)
• "veta om" appears under "veta" in SAOL, but not until "veta" in SO.

Hjälp!

[jnivre]

Thanks for alerting us to this discrepancy. It seems clear to me that "veta om" is a particle-verb construction and that the LinES-analysis is correct here. I will add this to the list of things to fix in Talbanken (and possibly PUD) for the next release. I don't think "veta om" is analogous to "know about" in English (except semantically). English "about" is an unstressed preposition, but Swedish "om" is a stressed particle.

[LarsAhrenberg]

I agree that it is sometimes difficult to judge in written Swedish whether a preposition is part of a phrasal verb ie a verb particle or a part of an argument phrase (obl in UD). In spoken language it is easier as the pronunciation is different. Not seldom it can be both as in text-book examples such as Hon hälsade på sin farmor meaning 'visited' in the phrasal reading and 'greeted' in the non-phrasal reading.

In the case of om it is even trickier as om can also be a subjunction. I agree with your interpretation of example (1), here, clearly om is a SCONJ. (I'm sure there may be errors in LinES but in the example you point to it is actually SCONJ. And for (2) and (3) I think LinES is correct.

[harisont]

Thanks! The LinES analysis looks good to me too. And yes, my usual test is actually to read the sentence out loud, but then I'm not always so sure I pronounce them correctly...

I'm sure there may be errors in LinES but in the example you point to it is actually SCONJ

@LarsAhrenberg if you mean, sv_lines-ud-train-doc6-2010, "veta om det hade gått ifrån dem" is annotated with compound:prt' and obj in 2.16.

[LarsAhrenberg]

Sorry, there are many om:s in that sentence and I was looking at another instance.
However, this is an ambigous case, and if you look at the larger context of that instance, som om man utan att själv veta om det hade gått ifrån dem, 'as if you , without knowing it, had gone away from them', the subject of gått is not det but man and det is the object of the phrasal verb veta om.

[harisont]

You are right, sorry!