Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2019
Edited by Janine Berns and Elena Tribushinina
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 36] 2019
► pp. 67–82
Part II: Selected papers presented at the Dutch Annual Linguistics Day
of 2019
Posture verbs combined with past participles in Dutch
Fixed or productive patterns?
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 5 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00024.bog
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00024.bog
Abstract
Dutch uses cardinal posture verbs (zitten ‘to
sit’, staan ‘to stand’, and liggen ‘to lie’)
for all sorts of purposes, many of which have received considerable research
attention – like the posture progressive, e.g. zitten te lezen
‘lit. sit to read: to be reading’. This paper investigates a posture verb
pattern in which a posture verb is combined with a past participle, e.g.
zitten verstopt ‘lit. sit hidden: to be hidden’. Previous
analyses disagree on whether these patterns correspond to a fixed set of
combinations, or to a productive schema with semantic restrictions. By examining
over 6,000 attestations of the pattern, this paper evaluates these competing
accounts, concluding that the data point strongly at productivity.
Article outline
- 1.A controversial posture verb pattern
- 2.Tracking down CPV-PP-patterns
- 3.Fixed or productive patterns?
- 3.1Quantitative measures
- 3.2Qualitative measure: Semantic coherence
- 4.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
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