‘Be’ Verbs in a Contrastive Perspective: The Case of BÝT, BE and VÆRE

This paper reports on a cross-linguistic study of ‘be’ verbs in Czech, English and Norwegian, viz. být, be være, drawing data from the fiction part International Comparable Corpus (Čermáková et al. 2021). The identifies two main uses verbs: auxiliary linking, plus an ‘other’ category which includes minor (often) language-specific uses. reveals marked proportional differences how three languages exploit grammatical functional potential their respective verbs, notably there is preference for linking Norwegian more even distribution between Czech. In case use, are shown to behave similarly, but with some regarding choice adjective describe fictional subjects. methodology highlights importance carefully crafted tertium comparationis at several levels, not only relation datasets linguistic phenomena investigated, also as regards terminology traditions description compared.