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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?

| Leiden University

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.

Keywords: posture verbs, past participles, corpus linguistics, semantics, syntactic productivity, fixedness, locational, locativity, resultativity
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
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
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00024.bog
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