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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2014
Edited by Anita Auer and Björn Köhnlein
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 31] 2014
► pp. 1–12

Auxiliary choice with Dutch verbs of directed motion

| Delft University of Technology
Dutch perfect tenses are constructed with the auxiliaries zijn ‘be’ and hebben ‘have’. Over the years, several semantic generalizations have been proposed to account for this auxiliary choice. This paper evaluates these generalizations on the basis of examples with verbs of directed motion (draaien ‘turn’, keren ‘turn’, and stijgen ‘ascend, rise’), collected from the Internet. The paper concludes that these data are problematic for analyses of auxiliary choice in terms of telicity and ‘Inferable Eventual Position or State’, yet provide support for analyses of auxiliary choice that rely on the notion of ‘construal’ of the motion event. In particular, the paper argues that zijn is used when the event is construed as a ‘change of state’, while hebben is used when it is construed as a ‘type of act’.
Keywords: semantics, construal, Auxiliary choice, directed motion verbs, construction grammar, attested data
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Published online: 10 November 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.31.01bel
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