Posture verbs combined with past participles in Dutch

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.