Consider the English sentence My sister lives in London. A very likely and straightforward Swedish translation of this sentence is Min syster bor i London, a translation that may be seen to have come about word by word. Using the channel model we can describe what happened as follows:
- My enters the channel. Its meaning is kept, its form is modified, and the peel of characters is replaced. Why do we say that the form is modified? While English My and Swedish Min are both ’1st person, singular possessive pronouns’, the Swedish word, unlike its English counterpart, is required to agree with its head noun. Changing sister to sisters and thus making it plural rather than singular, will have the effect that the possessive pronoun will be Mina, not min. Thus, Swedish possessives (some of them) are more restricted in their distribution than English possessives and that’s why we say that the form is modified.