The Swedish modal particle väl in a contrastive perspective

Abstract

The article analyses the Swedish modal particle väl by studying how its meanings are reflected in translational correspondences into English and French. The translations will be the input for discussing the type of lexical semantics needed to account for the multifunctionality of väl. They raise questions about whether väl has a unitary meaning or if it has several meanings (polysemy) and how meanings should be related to the context.