news (*to someone*). What is striking is that in these cases the non-causative construction is no longer possible: e.g.*The law broke. *The news broke.* This indicates that the ergative paradigm is no longer instantiated in these occurrences. Secondly, in diametrical opposition to the previous case, the verb *break* behaves like a full intransitive verb in *sun/dawn/mist/ clouds breaking*; in these usages passivization is no longer possible *Dawn has been broken*. Thirdly, and possibly related to the previous uses, there are cases where *break* is used in intransitive motion constructions, often with particles (e.g. *break free*, *break loose*, *break away*, *break adrift*, *break ahead*, *break through*, *break clear (of)*, *breaking forth*, *break in (to)*, etc.) or prepositional phrases (e.g. *most men seem unable to break beyond the six minute barrier (BNC)*).

One of the objectless constructions that has been attested in the BNC concerns the fixed expression *breaking and entering* where the object broken into (a house) is omitted, e.g.

(20) a. A burglar is inspecting a window with a view to **breaking and entering**, but in order to make his interest look innocent he pretends to be cleaning the windows. (BNC)

b. The poor have standards, dignity, taste, conviction: they live honestly, full of hate, shitting in the houses of the rich if they get a chance to **break and enter**.

c. The right [...] to enter (or in cases of emergency to **break and enter**) the Premises.

Even if this is a fixed pattern, it again follows the typical *V and V* pattern that favours omission of the object. Note that since *break* is coupled here with a motion event (*enter*) it behaves like an intransitive motion verb (*breaking and entering into [HOUSE]*).

Excluding all of these special cases, there are only a handful examples of 'true' objectless constructions left (about 0.1%), as in

(21) a. He's made sure there's nothing to break and lever with (BNC)
b. the it's very difficult to break (BNC)

In sum, apart from an occasional case of coercion, where a verb is put
into a construction that is incompatible with its usual constructional
behavior, the two verbs strongly disprefer the objectless construction, in
line with their paradigmatic preferences. The cases where such coercion
does occur tend to be those with the *V* and *V* pattern, a constructional
environment whose semantic value is precisely to maximize the focus on
the action itself within a scenario of role play or habitual actions.

3.3 Case study 2: The causative alternation

3.3.1 *Alternations or surface generalizations?*

The second case study that I will briefly present here concerns
the causative alternation. Let us start again with the verb *break* already
discussed above. As indicated, this verb typically allows the causative
alternation, the hallmark of the ergative paradigm (*The glass broke* vs. *John
broke the glass*). However, as already indicated above, in some cases this
alternation is no longer possible. In one case, such as illustrated by *John
broke the law*, it is the non-causative construction that is no longer possible
(*The law broke*); in another case, as illustrated by *The sun broke through the
clouds*, it is the causative (two-participant) construction that is no longer
allowed; it would actually be quite hard to imagine an Instigator for such
events. Given this variability, could one still regard *break* as an alternating
verb, as is often claimed in the literature? In terms of the discussion at the
beginning of this lecture (see Figure 3), the question can be phrased as
follows: which model is correct, the one insisting on alternations or the
one pushing for surface generalizations?

In order to answer that question, I did a corpus-based pilot study to
see to what extent such alternating verbs actually alternate. The corpus
that I have used for this study is the British part of the *International
Corpus of English* (ICE-GB)⁴; the reason for having used this corpus is
that, unlike the BNC, it is marked for syntactic phrases, which makes
it possible to limit the search to those patterns that are relevant to the
causative alternation. The underlying reasoning of our study is the
following. On the basis of (elaborate) corpus data, we can measure, using
certain statistical methods, for each alternating verb (*break*, *open*, *crumble*,
etc.) its *alternation strength*, i.e. an index which would indicate the degree
with which a verb alternates between a non-causative construction (a
one-participant construction, Cx1) and a causative construction (a two-
participant construction; Cx2). While strictly speaking the alternation
model does not *predict* anything about the frequency of alternation
occurring in corpus data, one would still expect them to pass at least the
threshold of mere chance, as otherwise it would be fairly pointless to
postulate the idea of alternations in the first place (regardless of whether
they are regarded as derivations or not). In other words, a high alternation
index could be interpreted as lending support to the alternation model,
since it would indicate that the alternation is frequent and productive and
thus cognitively salient. Conversely, a low alternation index indicates that
the verb does not alternate all that frequently, which could thus be taken
as indicating that each of the two constructions should be seen in its own
right, lending support to the surface generalizations model.

Looking at the degree of alternation in actual usage is an essential
step in the analysis, one that is all too often overlooked. We will use
two different methods to evaluate the degree of alternation of a given
verb. The first method is a collostructional analysis (more specifically,
a distinctive collexeme analysis) which is used to measure the degree to
which a verb is attracted to a particular construction. However, as we
show below, this should be complemented with a second method which
measures the degree of Theme overlap, i.e. the degree to which a given
Theme occurs in both constructional variants. The latter method is the
most important and innovative point of the present study. Before we
discuss these two methods in detail, some further information is needed
on the corpus sample on which it is based and how this was selected.
### 3.3.2 Distribution of verbs and constructions

Prior to extracting data from the ICE-GB corpus, a list was drawn up of all the verbs mentioned in Levin (1993) as occurring in the causative alternation. In total, 355 different verbs were used as search words to build our sub-corpus. As can be expected, many of the verbs in the list did not occur in the corpus and the resulting set of attested verbs was rather limited (28 in total); as this is less than 10% of the total list extracted from Levin (1993), the major contribution of our study is thus a methodological one, rather than one of substance. What is more, not all the occurrences of these verbs were taken up in our study and some manual post-editing was necessary. First of all, our selection followed an important syntactic constraint, in that only constructions of the form SUBJ-V-OBJ and SUBJ-V were retained.⁵ More specifically, this meant that all particle verb constructions, such as *burst into/away*, *break free/loose*, etc., were excluded from the sample. The reason for doing so is relatively straightforward: as already said in the previous section, these particle constructions often express INTRANSITIVE MOTION events and they often do not allow the causative alternation anymore. We have also excluded from the sample present and past participial constructions, as they, too, do not comply to the formal pattern. In addition, there are also semantic motivations for not including them, given their voice vagueness already mentioned above: *broken glass* can either refer to glass that has broken or glass that has been broken.

Secondly, some cases were removed from the corpus on lexical semantic grounds. Take for instance the verb *ring*, a verb of SOUND EMISSION, which does allow the causative alternation, as in the following example:

(22) a. The bell rang (non-causative)

b. I rang the bell (causative)

However, the verb often occurs as a verb of COMMUNICATION, as in *I'll ring you in the afternoon*. While the metonymical relation of this use of the verb *ring* to that in example 22 above is clear, it is no longer a member of the same
semantic class, and does not allow the causative alternation anymore: *I'll ring you* does not mean 'I cause you to ring' and *You ring* is not its non-causative counterpart. Consequently, all occurrences of *ring* with this particular meaning (41 occurrences on a total of 50, or 80%) have been weeded out.

Another problem concerns the verb *turn* as in

(23) a. The car turned (non-causative)

b. I turned the car (causative)

c. You can turn over there.

The status of 23c is actually ambiguous: *you* can be interpreted as the metonymic reference to the whole *YOU+CAR* and thus would be similar to the non-causative in 23a. However, if you read it as the you-person manipulating the car, then this is actually an objectless transitive (*You can turn (the car) over there*). Given that the first reading is still possible (and probably the most salient of the two), it has not been deleted from the sample.

The resulting sample of verbs retained concerns 28 different verbs, altogether occurring in a total of 653 attestations; this is a fairly modest sample, but it should be enough for a pilot study to test the method. If it is mere chance that is responsible for the occurrence of the two constructions, one would expect an even distribution between the two constructions, but this is clearly not how language works. In our sample, 262 sentences (40%) are causative constructions, 391 (60%) are non-causative. The distribution of the constructions over the 28 different verbs is presented in Table 4 and Figure 7.

The low number of data points motions to caution, yet it is striking to note that the distribution between the two constructions is not balanced at all: almost invariably, the non-causative is more frequent. Somewhat surprising also is the reversal for *open* and *close* in this respect: there are more things that are *opened* (causative) than that *open* (non-causative), whereas it is the other way around for *close*. An explanation for this can be found by looking at the types of Themes occurring in these constructions, a point to which we will return below.
<table><caption>Table 4. Distribution of Causative and Non-causative in ICE-GB</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">VERB</th><th colspan="2">CAUSATIVE</th><th colspan="2">NON-CAUSATIVE</th><th rowspan="2">Total</th></tr><tr><th>N</th><th>%</th><th>N</th><th>%</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>change</td><td>52</td><td>36%</td><td>92</td><td>64%</td><td><strong>144</strong></td></tr><tr><td>increase</td><td>40</td><td>40%</td><td>60</td><td>60%</td><td><strong>100</strong></td></tr><tr><td>move</td><td>22</td><td>29%</td><td>54</td><td>71%</td><td><strong>76</strong></td></tr><tr><td>vary</td><td>4</td><td>8%</td><td>45</td><td>92%</td><td><strong>49</strong></td></tr><tr><td>close</td><td>17</td><td>38%</td><td>28</td><td>62%</td><td><strong>45</strong></td></tr><tr><td>open</td><td>30</td><td>73%</td><td>11</td><td>27%</td><td><strong>41</strong></td></tr><tr><td>improve</td><td>16</td><td>44%</td><td>20</td><td>56%</td><td><strong>36</strong></td></tr><tr><td>break</td><td>14</td><td>61%</td><td>9</td><td>39%</td><td><strong>23</strong></td></tr><tr><td>worry</td><td>7</td><td>33%</td><td>14</td><td>67%</td><td><strong>21</strong></td></tr><tr><td>turn</td><td>3</td><td>21%</td><td>11</td><td>79%</td><td><strong>14</strong></td></tr><tr><td>burn</td><td>5</td><td>50%</td><td>5</td><td>50%</td><td><strong>10</strong></td></tr><tr><td>fly</td><td>6</td><td>55%</td><td>5</td><td>45%</td><td><strong>11</strong></td></tr><tr><td>alter</td><td>8</td><td>89%</td><td>1</td><td>11%</td><td><strong>9</strong></td></tr><tr><td>weaken</td><td>6</td><td>67%</td><td>3</td><td>33%</td><td><strong>9</strong></td></tr><tr><td>ring</td><td>2</td><td>25%</td><td>6</td><td>75%</td><td><strong>8</strong></td></tr><tr><td>fill</td><td>8</td><td>100%</td><td>—</td><td>—</td><td><strong>8</strong></td></tr><tr><td>diminish</td><td>2</td><td>25%</td><td>6</td><td>75%</td><td><strong>8</strong></td></tr><tr><td>double</td><td>2</td><td>29%</td><td>5</td><td>71%</td><td><strong>7</strong></td></tr><tr><td>divide</td><td>5</td><td>100%</td><td>—</td><td>—</td><td><strong>5</strong></td></tr><tr><td>freeze</td><td>1</td><td>20%</td><td>4</td><td>80%</td><td><strong>5</strong></td></tr><tr><td>intensify</td><td>3</td><td>60%</td><td>2</td><td>40%</td><td><strong>5</strong></td></tr><tr><td>drown</td><td>1</td><td>25%</td><td>3</td><td>75%</td><td><strong>4</strong></td></tr><tr><td>empty</td><td>2</td><td>67%</td><td>1</td><td>33%</td><td><strong>3</strong></td></tr><tr><td>explore</td><td>1</td><td>33%</td><td>2</td><td>67%</td><td><strong>3</strong></td></tr><tr><td>halt</td><td>1</td><td>33%</td><td>2</td><td>67%</td><td><strong>3</strong></td></tr><tr><td>shut</td><td>2</td><td>100%</td><td>—</td><td>—</td><td><strong>2</strong></td></tr><tr><td>warm</td><td>1</td><td>33%</td><td>2</td><td>67%</td><td><strong>3</strong></td></tr><tr><td>chip</td><td>1</td><td>100%</td><td>—</td><td>—</td><td><strong>1</strong></td></tr></tbody><tfoot><tr><td><strong>Total</strong></td><td><strong>262</strong></td><td><strong>40%</strong></td><td><strong>391</strong></td><td><strong>60%</strong></td><td><strong>653</strong></td></tr></tfoot></table>
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>Figure 7. Distribution of Causative and Non-causative in ICE-GB</figcaption></figure>

The above frequency analysis is only a first approximation; what is needed is method that allows us to measure the degree of attraction/ repulsion of a given verb and the construction; a *distinctive collostructional analysis* allows us to do just that.

### 3.3.3 Distinctive collostructional analysis

As the term suggests, a collostructional analysis (see Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004; Stefanowitsch and Gries 2005) combines a collocational analysis with a constructional analysis. Traditional collocation analysis looks at the co-occurrence of words within a particular window span of fairly arbitrary length (x numbers of words to the left and x numbers of words to the right); the syntactic construction is not taken into account. Collostructional analysis, in contrast, considers the co-occurrence of lexical items and their constructions. By doing so, one can evaluate the degree of attraction (or repulsion) between a lexical item and a particular construction. The classic example is that of *give* and the ditransitive construction. In a collostructional analysis, the degree of attraction of a lexical item is measured by drawing on four frequencies; applied to the example of *give* these would be: (i) the frequency of *give* in the corpus;
(ii) the frequency of *give* in the ditransitive; (iii) the total frequency of other verbs occurring in the ditransitive and (iv) the total frequency of all these verbs in the whole corpus. These frequencies give a 2-by-2 contingency table, as the one given below (taken from Stefanowitsch and Gries' work based on the ICE-GB); such a table allows us to run statistical significance tests; in this case the Fischer-Exact test is used (see Stefanowitsch and Gries 2005 for a justification of this).

<table><caption>**Table 5.** Collexeme analysis for *give* and the *ditransitive* (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2005: 8)</caption><thead><tr><th>(corpus: ICE-GB)</th><th>give</th><th>Other verbs</th><th>Row totals</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th scope="row">DITRANSITIVE</th><td>461 (exp = 9)</td><td>574 (exp = 1,026)</td><td>1,035</td></tr><tr><th scope="row">Other Cxs</th><td>699 (exp = 1,151)</td><td>136,930 (exp = 136,478)</td><td>137,629</td></tr><tr><th scope="row">Column totals</th><td>1,160</td><td>137,504</td><td>138,664</td></tr></tbody></table>

The Fischer Exact test gives a p-value of $1.84^{-120}$, which means that the distribution is not due to chance. To interpret what this table tells us about *give* and the ditransitive construction, one needs to compare the observed frequencies with the expected frequencies. Given the overall frequency of the verb *give*, in relation to other constructions in which it can occur and to other verbs that can occur in the ditransitive construction, *give* is expected to occur only 9 times in the ditransitive; however, in the corpus it occurs 461 times in this construction, which by far exceeds the expected frequency. In view of the extremely low p-value (indicating a very small margin of error), one can thus say that *give* is significantly attracted to the ditransitive construction.

However, instead of such a simple collexeme analysis (the relation between a lexeme and one construction), what we need for our study is a more complex calculation, since we are dealing with two constructions, the causative and the non-causative. What we need then is a *distinctive collexeme analysis* where we bring in two different constructions into the equation. The general idea behind a distinctive collexeme analysis is that one considers the attraction or repulsion of a lexical item to one particular
construction as opposed to another competing construction. Before applying this method to the causative alternation, let us first explain the general principle, drawing again on the *give* example considering its occurrence in the ditransitive vis-à-vis the *to*-dative. The distribution in the ICE-GB is as follows (data again drawn from Stefanowitsch and Gries' work):

<table><caption>**Table 6. Distinctive collexeme analysis (*give* in ditransitive vs. *to*-dative)</caption><thead><tr><th>(corpus: ICE-GB)</th><th>give</th><th>Other verbs</th><th>Row totals</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>DITRANSITIVE</td><td>461 (exp = 223)</td><td>574 (exp = 822)</td><td>1,035</td></tr><tr><td>TO-dative</td><td>146 (exp = 394)</td><td>1,773 (exp = 1,525)</td><td>1,919</td></tr><tr><td>Column totals</td><td>607</td><td>2,347</td><td>2,954</td></tr></tbody></table>

The results are highly significant (p=0) revealing that *give* is highly distinctive for one construction; the comparison of the expected and the observed frequencies reveals that *give* occurs significantly much more frequently than expected in the ditransitive construction and much less than expected in the *to*-dative. In other words, *give* is not only significantly attracted to the ditransitive (Table 5) but it is also *distinctive* for this construction (Table 6). Stefanowitsch and Gries argue that this is because the meaning of the verb *give* is quite compatible with the semantics of the ditransitive which expresses a TRANSFER (‘X causes Y to receive Z’); the *to*-dative, in contrast, expresses CAUSED MOTION (‘X causes Y to move to Z’) and has other verbs that are distinctive for it, such as *bring* or *take*. Again, the semantics of these verbs lines up quite nicely with that of the *to*-dative construction.

The distinctive collexeme analysis seems well-suited to measure the alternation strength of verbs occurring in the causative alternation, as it could allow us to compute the degree with which a verb is distinctive for either the causative or the non-causative, or not distinctive at all. If a verb is significantly attracted to one particular construction, then its alternation strength could be said to be rather minimal. Conversely, verbs
that are not distinctive for either of these constructions would have a higher alternation strength.

Recall that for a distinctive collexeme analysis four frequencies are needed for each verb and applied to our case, these are the following: the frequency of the verb in a CAUSATIVE construction, its frequency in the NON-CAUSATIVE, and the frequencies of the other alternating verbs in the two constructions. For example, for *open*, the contingency table on which the calculation is based is given in Table 7.

<table><caption>Table 7. Distinctive collexeme analysis for *open* in ICE-GB</caption><thead><tr><th>(corpus: ICE-GB)</th><th><em>open</em></th><th>Other verbs</th><th>Row totals</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>CAUSATIVE</th><td>30 (exp = 16.45)</td><td>232 (exp = 245.55)</td><td><strong>262</strong></td></tr><tr><th>NON CAUSATIVE</th><td>11 (exp = 24.55)</td><td>380 (exp = 366.45)</td><td><strong>391</strong></td></tr><tr><th>Column Totals</th><td><strong>41</strong></td><td><strong>612</strong></td><td><strong>653</strong></td></tr></tbody></table>

Applying the Fisher Exact test to this table gives a p-value of 0.00001, (–log10 = 5.0013) which indicates that *open* is distinctive for one of the two constructions.⁶ The difference between observed and expected frequencies indicates that the attraction is towards the causative construction (OBS = EXP*2). If we then apply the same type of calculation to all the verbs in our sample, we get the results given in Table 8.⁷

Given the modest size of our sample, the table reveals only moderate tendencies. Nevertheless, it can clearly be observed that *open*, *fill*, *alter*, *divide*, and *break* are significantly distinctive for CAUSATIVE, whereas *vary* and *move* are significantly distinctive for NON-CAUSATIVE. Even if the other verbs may be grouped toward either construction, their attraction to these is statistically non-significant (the value 1.30103 for the collocational strength being the cut-off point for a 0.05 level of significance).

The reason that some of the verbs are attracted to a particular construction can be explained by the high frequency of some Themes. For example, 5 out of the 14 causatives with *break* concern the Themes
<table><caption>Table 8. Distinctive collexeme analysis for alternating verbs in ICE-GB</caption><thead><tr><th>words</th><th>obs freq 1</th><th>obs freq 2</th><th>exp freq 1</th><th>exp freq 2</th><th>pref occur</th><th>delta p constr<br>to word</th><th>delta p word<br>to constr</th><th>coll strength</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>open</td><td>30</td><td>11</td><td>16.4502</td><td>24.5498</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0864</td><td>0.3526</td><td>5.0013*</td></tr><tr><td>fill</td><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>3.2098</td><td>4.7902</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0305</td><td>0.6062</td><td>3.2011*</td></tr><tr><td>alter</td><td>8</td><td>1</td><td>3.611</td><td>5.389</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.028</td><td>0.4945</td><td>2.4339*</td></tr><tr><td>divide</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>2.0061</td><td>2.9939</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0191</td><td>0.6034</td><td>1.9931*</td></tr><tr><td>break</td><td>14</td><td>9</td><td>9.2282</td><td>13.7718</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0304</td><td>0.215</td><td>1.4768*</td></tr><tr><td>weaken</td><td>6</td><td>3</td><td>3.611</td><td>5.389</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0152</td><td>0.2692</td><td>1.0036</td></tr><tr><td>shut</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>0.8025</td><td>1.1975</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0076</td><td>0.6006</td><td>0.7942</td></tr><tr><td>fly</td><td>6</td><td>5</td><td>4.4135</td><td>6.5865</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0101</td><td>0.1467</td><td>0.6064</td></tr><tr><td>intensify</td><td>3</td><td>2</td><td>2.0061</td><td>2.9939</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0063</td><td>0.2003</td><td>0.4962</td></tr><tr><td>improve</td><td>16</td><td>20</td><td>14.4441</td><td>21.5559</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0099</td><td>0.0457</td><td>0.4524</td></tr><tr><td>empty</td><td>2</td><td>1</td><td>1.2037</td><td>1.7963</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0051</td><td>0.2667</td><td>0.4516</td></tr><tr><td>burn</td><td>5</td><td>5</td><td>4.0123</td><td>5.9877</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0063</td><td>0.1003</td><td>0.4327</td></tr><tr><td>chip</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>0.4012</td><td>0.5988</td><td>CAUS</td><td>0.0038</td><td>0.5997</td><td>0.3966</td></tr><tr><td>vary</td><td>4</td><td>45</td><td>19.66</td><td>29.34</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0998</td><td>-0.3455</td><td>6.5834*</td></tr><tr><td>move</td><td>22</td><td>54</td><td>30.4931</td><td>45.5069</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0541</td><td>-0.1265</td><td>1.6586*</td></tr><tr><td>turn</td><td>3</td><td>11</td><td>5.6172</td><td>8.3828</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0167</td><td>-0.191</td><td>0.9215</td></tr><tr><td>change</td><td>52</td><td>92</td><td>57.7764</td><td>86.2236</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0368</td><td>-0.0515</td><td>0.8103</td></tr></tbody></table>

(continued)
<table><thead><tr><th>words</th><th>obs freq 1</th><th>obs freq 2</th><th>exp freq 1</th><th>exp freq 2</th><th>pref occur</th><th>delta p constr to word</th><th>delta p word to constr</th><th>coll strength</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>diminish</td><td>2</td><td>6</td><td>3.2098</td><td>4.7902</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0077</td><td>-0.1531</td><td>0.5065</td></tr><tr><td>ring</td><td>2</td><td>6</td><td>3.2098</td><td>4.7902</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0077</td><td>-0.1531</td><td>0.5065</td></tr><tr><td>freeze</td><td>1</td><td>4</td><td>2.0061</td><td>2.9939</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0064</td><td>-0.2028</td><td>0.4762</td></tr><tr><td>worry</td><td>7</td><td>14</td><td>8.4257</td><td>12.5743</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0091</td><td>-0.0701</td><td>0.4653</td></tr><tr><td>double</td><td>2</td><td>5</td><td>2.8086</td><td>4.1914</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0052</td><td>-0.1168</td><td>0.3803</td></tr><tr><td>close</td><td>17</td><td>28</td><td>18.0551</td><td>26.9449</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0067</td><td>-0.0252</td><td>0.3624</td></tr><tr><td>drown</td><td>1</td><td>3</td><td>1.6049</td><td>2.3951</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0039</td><td>-0.1522</td><td>0.3253</td></tr><tr><td>increase</td><td>40</td><td>60</td><td>40.1225</td><td>59.8775</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-8e-04</td><td>-0.0014</td><td>0.2714</td></tr><tr><td>expode</td><td>1</td><td>2</td><td>1.2037</td><td>1.7963</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0013</td><td>-0.0682</td><td>0.1895</td></tr><tr><td>halt</td><td>1</td><td>2</td><td>1.2037</td><td>1.7963</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0013</td><td>-0.0682</td><td>0.1895</td></tr><tr><td>warm</td><td>1</td><td>2</td><td>1.2037</td><td>1.7963</td><td>NON.CAUS</td><td>-0.0013</td><td>-0.0682</td><td>0.1895</td></tr></tbody></table>
rule/law; pertinently, this combination can only occur in the causative: the non-causative *The law broke* is not acceptable.⁸ In other words, laws can be broken, but cannot break. Other similar examples can be given quite easily: certain things can be opened (or closed), such as a can of baked beans, but tend not to open or close by themselves (*a can of baked beans opened*).

As indicated above, the distinct collexeme analysis gives the association strength between a verb and a given construction, which is a first indication of the alternating strength of a verb. If verbs are significantly attracted to one particular construction, then its alternation strength could be said to be rather minimal. Conversely, verbs that are not distinctive would have a higher alternation strength. However, this conclusion is not entirely correct, since it does not take the Theme into account. Let us consider a (simplified yet real) example to illustrate this. Suppose that the verb *break* were to occur in two usages only, *break the law* (CAUS only) and *the day broke* (NON-CAUS only); the Themes occurring in these constructions (*law* and *day*) are quite different. Suppose further that both constructions each occur 25 times in the corpus. The collostructional analysis would then indicate that it is non-distinctive for either construction which, in line with what we said above, could then be interpreted as indicating a high degree of alternation. Nevertheless, both syntactically and semantically this does not make much sense: the two constructions are not each other's equivalent and could not be, since the Themes are restricted to the particular construction they are attested in: the causative for *law* (*The law broke*) and the non-causative for *day* (*The sun broke the day*).

In other words, we need to bring in this third element, the Theme, into the equation to be able to determine the alternation strength of a verb. More specifically, as revealed by the *break*-example above, we need to compute to what extent a given Theme is **shared** by the two constructions and we need to apply that to all the Themes of a verb in order to measure its overall alternation strength. The collostructional
analysis above does not allow us to do that, so we have developed a different method, described below.

### 3.3.4 Measuring Theme overlap

The rationale for computing the Theme overlap in the two constructions is fairly straightforward. The Theme is the participant that is common to both constructions, e.g. *John opened the door* vs. *The door opened*; the frequency of a given Theme in both constructions (the degree of Theme overlap) is a good indicator of the verb's readiness to occur in the alternation. If there is a high degree of the Theme overlap, then that means the verb in question is saliently an alternating verb; if, on the other hand, there is a low degree of Theme overlap, then both constructions basically select Themes from different sets and there is little common ground between the two constructions for that verb. Its alternating character would then be rather marginal, or, put differently, it would have low alternation strength. In the following, we present two measures to compute a verb's alternation strength: the *Shared Token Index* and the *Shared Type Index*. These are Jaccard similarity coefficients (also known as *Intersection over Union*), a statistic used for comparing the similarity and diversity of sample sets. In our case, these sets are the collections of Themes that occur with the causative and non-causative construction; the Jaccard-index is thus the intersection between the two sets of Themes (Theme-C ∩ Theme-NC).

The Shared Token Index only gives a first approximation of the shared Themes between the two constructions; it computes the overlap ratio based on the token frequency of shared Themes on the total token frequency for that Theme (N Shared TH / Total TH). The results for each of the verbs are shown in Table 9.⁹

Quite strikingly, the overlap ratio is rather low for all of the verbs (except for *worry*) and often simply non-existent. While the Shared Token Index may give a first indication, it is non-resistant to high frequencies of a particular Theme. For example, a high frequency of *break the law*
<table><caption>Table 9. Shared Token Index (ICE-GB)</caption><thead><tr><th>verb</th><th>TH token</th><th>CAUS</th><th>C-shared Token</th><th>C-only</th><th>TOT Shared</th><th>NON CAUS</th><th>NC-shared Token</th><th>NC only</th><th>Shared Token Index</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>change</td><td>144</td><td>52</td><td>15</td><td>37</td><td>32</td><td>92</td><td>17</td><td>75</td><td>0.22</td></tr><tr><td>increase</td><td>100</td><td>40</td><td>14</td><td>26</td><td>32</td><td>60</td><td>18</td><td>42</td><td>0.32</td></tr><tr><td>move</td><td>76</td><td>22</td><td>1</td><td>21</td><td>29</td><td>54</td><td>29</td><td>25</td><td>0.38</td></tr><tr><td>vary</td><td>49</td><td>4</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>45</td><td>45</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>close</td><td>45</td><td>17</td><td>3</td><td>14</td><td>6</td><td>28</td><td>3</td><td>25</td><td>0.13</td></tr><tr><td>open</td><td>41</td><td>30</td><td>6</td><td>24</td><td>9</td><td>11</td><td>3</td><td>8</td><td>0.22</td></tr><tr><td>improve</td><td>36</td><td>16</td><td>2</td><td>14</td><td>7</td><td>20</td><td>5</td><td>15</td><td>0.19</td></tr><tr><td>break</td><td>23</td><td>14</td><td>0</td><td>14</td><td>0</td><td>9</td><td>0</td><td>9</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>worry</td><td>21</td><td>7</td><td>6</td><td>1</td><td>20</td><td>14</td><td>14</td><td>0</td><td>0.95</td></tr><tr><td>turn</td><td>14</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>11</td><td>0</td><td>11</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>burn</td><td>10</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>fly</td><td>11</td><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>alter</td><td>9</td><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>weaken</td><td>9</td><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>ring</td><td>8</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>6</td><td>0</td></tr></tbody><tfoot><tr><td colspan="10">(continued)</td></tr></tfoot></table>
<table><thead><tr><th>verb</th><th>TH token</th><th>CAUS</th><th>C-shared Token</th><th>C-only</th><th>TOT Shared</th><th>NON CAUS</th><th>NC-shared Token</th><th>NC only</th><th>Shared Token Index</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>diminish</td><td>8</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>6</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>double</td><td>7</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>fracze</td><td>5</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>intensify</td><td>5</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>drown</td><td>4</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>empty</td><td>3</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>expode</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>halt</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>warm</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>(shut)</td><td>2</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>(divide)</td><td>5</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>(fill)</td><td>8</td><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>(chip)</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr></tbody></table>
will indicate a low degree of overlap, whereas it may be that all the other Themes occurring with break (e.g. *glass* or *window*) all alternate. This would actually mean that it does have a high alternation strength, but the high token frequency of *break the law* pushes the result in the other direction. So, what we need is a count of the types of Themes that are shared, rather than the tokens. In our *break* example, that would mean that the Theme *law* only counts for 1 (regardless of its token frequency) alongside the other Themes, which each count for 1 as well. The Shared Type Index thus considers the frequency of the types of Themes shared by the two constructions, regardless of their Token frequency. One could thus say that the Shared Token Index indicates the pure quantitative overlap of Themes, whereas the Shared Type Index is a more qualitative measure. Table 10 presents the ratio of shared types with respect to the total number of (different) types of Themes.

As can be expected, the Shared Type Index is even lower than the Token index, for all verbs: none of them except *worry* has a Type overlap higher than 7%; this indicates that none of these verbs seem to alternate very much in the corpus with the same Themes occurring both in subject and object position. However, once again, the frequencies are actually too low to draw any definite conclusions. Nevertheless, the method used here shows how one can measure the alternation strength of verbs using corpus data.

The primary purpose of this case study was to present a new method to measure the alternation strength of verbs entering into the causative alternation. Such measure should take into account the Theme overlap which we argue is a crucial factor in determining a verb's alternation strength. As an initial exploration of a verb's alternation strength, we have suggested two indices to measure the degree of shared Themes (based on either Token and Type frequency). What these measures have revealed is that, in real language usage, there is actually very little Theme overlap. This should not come as a surprise, given that what is at issue here are particular usage events, where the semantics of the construal meshes with that of
<table><caption>Table 10. Shared Type Index (ICE-GB)</caption><thead><tr><th>verb</th><th>TH type</th><th>CAUS</th><th>C-shared Type</th><th>C only</th><th>Shared</th><th>NON CAUS</th><th>NC-shared Type</th><th>NC only</th><th>Shared Type Index</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>change</td><td>93</td><td>38</td><td>4</td><td>30</td><td>8</td><td>63</td><td>4</td><td>55</td><td>0.09</td></tr><tr><td>increase</td><td>65</td><td>34</td><td>6</td><td>22</td><td>12</td><td>43</td><td>6</td><td>31</td><td>0.18</td></tr><tr><td>move</td><td>40</td><td>19</td><td>1</td><td>18</td><td>1</td><td>22</td><td>1</td><td>21</td><td>0.03</td></tr><tr><td>vary</td><td>45</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>41</td><td>0</td><td>41</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>close</td><td>32</td><td>10</td><td>1</td><td>9</td><td>1</td><td>23</td><td>1</td><td>22</td><td>0.03</td></tr><tr><td>open</td><td>27</td><td>20</td><td>1</td><td>18</td><td>2</td><td>9</td><td>1</td><td>7</td><td>0.07</td></tr><tr><td>improve</td><td>28</td><td>14</td><td>1</td><td>12</td><td>2</td><td>16</td><td>1</td><td>14</td><td>0.07</td></tr><tr><td>break</td><td>18</td><td>11</td><td>0</td><td>11</td><td>0</td><td>7</td><td>0</td><td>7</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>worry</td><td>2</td><td>2</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>0.50</td></tr><tr><td>turn</td><td>8</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>burn</td><td>9</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>fly</td><td>8</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>alter</td><td>9</td><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>weaken</td><td>9</td><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>ring</td><td>5</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td></tr></tbody></table>

(continued)
<table><thead><tr><th>verb</th><th>TH type</th><th>CAUS</th><th>C-shared Type</th><th>C only</th><th>Shared</th><th>NON CAUS</th><th>NC-shared Type</th><th>NC only</th><th>Shared Type Index</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>diminish</td><td>8</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>6</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>double</td><td>7</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>freeze</td><td>5</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>intensify</td><td>5</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>drown</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>empty</td><td>3</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>expode</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>halt</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>warm</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>(shut)</td><td>2</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>(divide)</td><td>5</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>5</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>(fill)</td><td>8</td><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>(chip)</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr></tbody></table>
the verbs and particularly with the type of participants occurring in the
events that they express. Particularly in the causative alternation, the nature
of the Theme, i.e. its capacity to self-instigate the event, is a crucial factor
controlling its occurrence in the non-causative. The low Theme overlap
does show that the alternating character of these lexical causatives may be
less high than is often assumed in the literature and that it is influenced by
the particulars of the individual uses of these verbs.

Unfortunately, the results of our pilot study are not (yet) decisive for
two reasons. One reason is that the sample from the ICE-GB is too small
to draw any reliable conclusions. We need to expand the data selection
to a much larger sample; however, currently this is not feasible since for
unparsed corpora, the selection of the two type of constructions is to
be done manually, which is unfeasible. Secondly, for our calculation of
Theme overlap, we have taken each Theme at face value. That means
that despite their semantic similarity in the context of a breaking event,
(common) Themes like *arm* and *leg* (both referring to limbs) or *glass* and
*crystal* (both referring to brittle objects made of comparable material)
have been considered as different. To arrive at a better measure of shared
Themes, it seems warranted that such semantically similar Themes
should be grouped together. Sentences such as *He broke the glass* and
*The crystal vase broke* would then still count as contributing to the verb's
alternation strength, since the Themes *glass* and *crystal* even though they
are strictly speaking different, share enough properties to be considered
equivalent in the context of a breaking event. The reason why we have
not done this is that if this is done manually, such semantic grouping risks
being subjective. One such more objective method that has recently been
developed is that of distributional semantics (see Romain 2017, 2018).

**3.4 Concluding remarks**

In this lecture, I have presented my lexico-paradigmatic approach
to lexical causatives in English. As the term suggests, this approach fuses
two perspectives, the paradigmatic and the lexical. The paradigmatic perspective, drawn from functional-systemic work (Halliday 1985; Davidse 1999, Matthiesen and Halliday 2004) holds that the grammar of English is structured by two larger constructional models, the transitive and the ergative. The transitive paradigm is Agent-centred, the ergative paradigm is Theme-centered. Each of these come with their own type of constructions. One of these, typical of the transitive domain, is the objectless construction, such as *Soldiers trained to kill*. Another set of constructions, typical of the ergative domain this time, is the causative alternation, as in *The door opens* vs. *He opened the door*. What our lexical perspective has revealed is that these constructional possibilities interact in intricate ways with the meaning of the verb, as confirmed by our two case studies on contemporary English. However, the interaction between lexical and constructional meaning is also revealed in a diachronic perspective, discussed in the next lecture.

## Notes

1. For some recent dictionary-style work on verb valency patterns, see, for example, Herbst et al. (2004); the different valency patterns (for English) can be consulted on-line in the Erlangen Patternbank available at http://www.patternbank.uni-erlangen.de.

2. To avoid terminological confusion, we do not follow systemic-functional grammar where the following terms are used to refer to the participants: *Actor* and *Goal* for the transitive paradigm, and *Instigator* and *Medium* ('the medium through which the process is actualized' Matthiesen and Halliday 2004: 284), for the ergative. We use more conventional terminology: (transitive) *Agent*, (transitive) *Patient*, (ergative) *Theme* and (ergative) *Instigator*; we have preserved the latter to distinguish it from the transitive Agent, even if this is not really essential to our account.

3. Free interface available at http://www.webcorp.org.uk.

4. http://ice-corpora.net/ice/

5. The pattern SUBJ-V-OBJ is to be interpreted loosely, as also passives were included; see, however, below on past participle constructions (where the participle is used as an adjective, for example).

6. As explained by Stefanowitsch and Gries (2005), the p-values undergo a base ten log-transformation to yield a better measure of collostructional strength.
7 Computations were executed with Stefan Gries' R-script (Gries, Stefan Th. 2007. Coll. 3.2. A program for R for Windows 2.x). The free use of this program is herewith gratefully acknowledged. An asterisk following the collostructional strength indicates statistical significance: Coll.strength>3 => p<0.001; coll. strength>2 => p<0.01; coll.strength>1.30103 => p<0.05.

8 The low figures motion once again to caution, yet more extensive data from the BNC on *break* show that this type of Theme is indeed quite frequent: *law* and *rule(s)* taken together represent close to 10% of the Themes occurring in the causative construction, on a random selection of 443 examples.

9 The verbs in brackets (*shut*, *divide*, *fill* and *chip*) are those for which one of the constructions has not been attested in the sample.
# Lexical-paradigmatic analysis of lexical causatives (diachronic perspective)

## 4.1 Introduction

The previous lecture described the paradigmatic view as developed within Halliday's systemic-functional model, which holds that the grammar of English lexical causatives is governed by two general causative models, the transitive and the ergative models, which project their specific participant constellations. The transitive paradigm, which centers around the Agent, prototypically involves a maximally asymmetrical relation between a (volitional) Agent acting on an inert Patient.¹ The ergative paradigm centers around the Theme, the participant that co-participates in the event (which explains why it is called *Medium* in Halliday's framework) and which may even self-instigate the event. The non-effective ergative construction, such as *The door opened* is in fact characterized by a voice vagueness that leaves the question of instigation unanswered: the event can be externally instigated or not. The larger context could add information that resolves the voice vagueness. For example, in the sentence *The door opened and in came John*, the second part clarifies that the opening was instigated by John. In *The door opened but no one was there*, the *but*-clause invites the inference that the opening was self-instigated.
The ergative effective construction, in turn, overtly expresses the external instigation, e.g. *The boy opened the door*. While formally this sentence looks the same as a transitive effective construction (e.g. *The boy hit the ball*), the paradigmatic view holds that it is different semantically, precisely because the Theme-process nucleus can be isolated in a non-effective construction (*The door opened*), which is not at all possible with a transitive sentence (*The ball hit*).

The previous lecture has also shown that while these two models manage to explain a number of phenomena in a coherent manner, their realization also depends on the individual verbs that occur in these constructions. As it happens, the semantics of these verbs does play an important role. First of all, verbs can be shown to have a prototypical paradigmatic preference. For example, many of the verbs of killing (e.g. *murder*, *kill*, *assassinate*, etc.) turn out to be transitive verbs, because of their reference to events in which the (volitional) Agent is central and the victim is merely an inert, wholly affected entity. However, one subgroup in this lexical field, the SUFFOCATE verbs, tends to be ergative, a preference which can again be explained by their semantics: they refer to events involving a semi-autonomous bodily process (suffocation); in addition, the causes of suffocation are often imperceptible (poisonous gas, lack of air, etc.) which favours a construal of the event without reference to this cause. In other words, it is more typical to say *People suffocated than The poisonous gas suffocated the people*.

The semantics of the verbs can also explain why certain constructions are not so common. For example, verbs of KILLING tend not to occur in the medio-passive (middle) construction (*X kills easily* with X being the patient) nor do they easily occur in the *-able* derivation (’killable, ’murderable, ’slayable, etc.). The reason for this has to do with the semantics of these verbs which is incompatible with that of these two constructions. Both the middle construction and the *-able* derivation foreground the properties of the affected entity, and in particular those that are pertinent to the process at hand. Often, they are general statements about the
feasibility of the action, which can be attributed to particular properties of the affected entity. For instance, a slogan like *This adaptor plugs into any power outlet* foregrounds the properties of the adaptor that facilitate its use, by any Agent (hence also the omission of this Agent). Similarly, a readable book does not refer to just any book (since in principle, any book can be read), but one that has the properties that make that it can be read *easily* (again, by anyone). In other words, these two constructions focus on the properties that facilitate (or hinder, in the negative case) the process. This value is precisely what makes the two constructions semantically incompatible with verbs of *KILLING*: it is unusual (or morally questionable) to think of an entity (typically a human being) as having the properties that make it easy to kill or murder them. In earlier work (Lemmens 1998a), I have characterized verbs of *KILLING* as typically 'non-middable verbs'. Clearly, this can be overruled and, in some contexts, a middle construction or an *-able* derivation with these verbs can still be sanctioned (see Lemmens 1998a: 78ff for some examples and discussion).

It is fairly safe to say that each individual verb has its own 'paradigmatic niche'. From a usage-based perspective, this can be explained by the repeated occurrence of a given verb in a particular set of constructions (either transitive or ergative). For example, chances are minimal that a verb such as *murder* will ever be attested in a non-causative construction (ergative) with the subject as the Theme, the entity undergoing the action. Conversely, as shown in one of the case studies discussed in the previous lecture, a verb such as *starve* has a very low chance of occurring in an objectless construction (transitive). These two verbs are thus strongly entrenched as, respectively, a transitive and an ergative verb. However, as already indicated in the previous lecture, things are not always this clear-cut and verbs may be variable in their paradigmatic behavior, depending on the context in which they occur. As already illustrated, if an entity does not possess the properties that allow it to co-participate in the event, as in *He opened a can of baked beans* or *She broke the law*, the construction is said to no longer instantiate the ergative paradigm, as confirmed by the impossibility of the non-effective construction (with the
Theme as subject), ?*The can opened*, ?*The law broke*.

There may, however, also be more general factors at work which affect a verb's paradigmatic potential. One of these, which was only mentioned in passing in the previous lecture, is the particle construction, as illustrated in the following (corpus) examples (all drawn from Lemmens 1998a).

(1) a. When he had choked down the last detestable bite
b. *The last detestable bite choked down.

(2) a. Choking back sobs, he remarked, 'It's only a game, right?'
b. *Sobs choked back.

(3) a. I choked out some words through my grief and misery
b. *Some words choked out.

(4) a. That rate may be high enough to choke off economic growth
b. *Economic growth choked off.

(5) a. The activists ... sounded a horn to drown out the opening bell.
b. *The opening bell drowned out.

In these examples two typically ergative verbs, *choke* and *drown* are used with the particles *down*, *back*, *off* or *out*. In each case the non-causative construction is no longer possible, as shown in the b-sentences. The reason is that the particle construction expresses a **CAUSED MOTION** event that is saliently transitive, i.e. it involves an Agent operating deliberately and directedly on another affected entity (Patient) to cause this entity to move (literally or metaphorically). These cases can be regarded as instances of coercion, where the semantics of the construction (**CAUSED MOTION**) overrides the semantic (or here, paradigmatic) properties of the verb.

In the remaining part of this lecture, we will consider some diachronic changes that have affected the paradigmatic nature of English lexical causatives. We will present three case studies:

(i) the ergativization of intransitives (illustrated by the verbs *starve*, *hunger*, *thirst*),
(ii) the ergativization of transitives (illustrated by the SUFFOCATE verbs), and

(iii) some individual changes (*abort*, *throttle*).

These case studies are not quantitative analyses based on an exhaustive exploration of historical corpora; they are qualitative studies based on data from the *Oxford English Dictionary* (henceforth referred to as the OED). Their point is precisely to show how the semantics of the verb, as used in a particular context, affects it paradigmatic potential over time.

## 4.2 The ergativization of intransitives

In the Hallidayan framework, core intransitives, like *John dies*, are characterized as Agent-process constellations that cannot extend to a Patient (which distinguishes them from verbs such as *kill*) nor can they open up to include an Instigator. The latter distinguishes them from verbs such as *starve* which can occur in a formally intransitive construction (*People are starving*) which can, however, be extended to include the Instigator (*The government is starving the people*). A change from intransitive to ergative, which is what concerns us here, thus implies a move from a fully autonomous non-instigatable process to a semi-autonomous one, i.e. a process that has become conceivable as instigatable. The verb *starve* is precisely the verb that concerns us most here, since it has undergone such a change from an intransitive to an ergative verb. It will be recalled from our first case study in the previous lecture that this verb is quite saliently ergative, with a strong preference for occurring in the non-causative construction and it does not occur, apart from some exceptional cases, in an objectless construction (typical of the transitive paradigm). Surprisingly perhaps, the verb *starve* has not always been a verb allowing an ergative construal of the event. Consider the following examples from the OED:

(6) Annanias and Saphiran ... steorfende afeollon (OED, c. 1000)
'Annanias and Saphiran ... fell dying'
(7) Se man ...þe nan ne heafde stærf of hungor (OED, 1124)

‘The man ... that didn’t have to die from hunger’

As shown by these examples, in Old and Early Middle English *starve*
was more or less the equivalent of present-day *die*. In this original usage
*starve* reveals its formal and semantic affinity with other (West-)Germanic
languages (e.g. Old Frisian *sterva*, Old Saxon *sterban*, Middle Dutch *sterven*,
and Old High German *sterban*). In the 12th century, the verb *die* came to
be used, a verb borrowed from Old Norse (*deyjan*, cmp. Modern Swedish
dö ‘die’). Although there might have been subtle semantic differences
between the two verbs, the apparent near-synonymy and interchangeability
may have triggered *starve* to undergo a process of semantic specialization,
whereas *die* has remained fairly constant in its usages; strikingly, none of the
many meanings of *die* listed in the OED is marked as obsolete. In contrast,
out of its relatively wide range of types of dying, *starve* starts to profile one
particular kind, referring to a lingering death caused by hunger (examples 8
and 9 below), cold (example 10), grief, or slow disease. Also common were
metaphorical extensions of this usage, such as expressing extreme suffering,
example 11, or pining away with desire, example 12. The OED-data indicate
that this new profile manifests itself by the end of the 16th and in the
course of the 17th century.

(8) ... the prisoners ... that were **steruing** for famine (OED, 1618)

(9) An Animal that **starves** of Hunger, dies feverish and delirious (OED, 1735)

(10) So out of doores go they with his clothes ... and left Nicholas
Nouive **starving** and quaking in that dog-hole. (OED, 1602)

(11) The weather grows cold ... I'll go rise, for my hands are **starving** while I write in bed. (OED, 1710)

(12) Though our soules doe **sterve** For want of Knowledge, we doe little care. (OED, 1616)

The addition of *for*, *of*, or *for want of* occurs regularly with *starve* to
specify the shortcomings from which the victim suffers. In contemporary English, the *for*-complement is not necessary anymore, as in literal usage there is only one possible shortcoming when *starve* is used, viz. that of nutrition (semantic narrowing). This means that from the 17th century up to the present, *starve* has further specialized to mean ‘to die for, or suffer extremely from, lack of food’. However, when used metaphorically, a *for*-complement specifying what is yearned for is common, e.g. *a company starving for cash*.

Interestingly, the lexical change is accompanied by a constructional change, as the verb starts to occur in a two-participant construction (the earliest attestation listed in the OED is from 1529), in literal as well as in metaphorical usage:

(13) He ... also **sterued** them for hunger and cold, so that many died. (OED, 1560)

(14) Who abuseth his cattle and **starues** them for meat (OED, 1573)

(15) In steede of consuming and **staruing** your euil, you giue it nourishment (OED, 1581)

This is a clear instance of ergativization: in its original meaning ‘die’, the process encoded by *starve* was clearly non-instigatable (as typical of core intransitives). However, its evolution towards the conceptualization of a lingering death resulting from deprivation (of any kind) created the semantic conditions for the inclusion of an Instigator, a possible external controller depriving the Affected of vital needs. In other words, the verb came to denote a process conceivable as instigatable. While initially this ergativization may have been an extended usage, the ergative pattern has established itself firmly in the course of time and the verb has lost its hook-up with the intransitive to become a full-fledged ergative verb. As is typical of ergative verbs, there is an ambiguity in the interpretation of past participles, a construction which is quite common with *starve*. It is perhaps the intransitive origin of *starve* that explains why even in contemporary English it has a strong preference for occurring in the non-
causative construction (cf. Table 3 showing that in various contemporary corpora, this accounts for 51% of the cases).

Interestingly, when *starve* starts to occur in ergative constructions, also the semantically related verb *hunger* appears to undergo a similar process of ergativization, as shown by the following examples.

(16) The Prince ... came himself To **hunger** Middleburgh (OED, 1575)

(17) Theire pasture will **hunger** our beasts ... (OED, 1641)

The verb *hunger* and its counterpart *thirst* are also attested in pseudo-effective constructions, which look like transitive constructions (they have a direct object) but are not true transitives, as there is no effectedness. The following example is a nice illustration which essentially gives participant status to a circumstantial element.

(18) Blessid be þei þat **hungren** and **thirstun** riðtwitnesse (OED, 1382)
‘Blessed are they that hunger and thirst (for) righteousness’

In Modern English, such constructions are unusual (if not unidiomatic) and a for-complement is to be used (*hunger/thirst for righteousness*).

Unlike with *starve*, however, the ergative pattern attested with *hunger* does not get entrenched and much of the lexical proximity has also been lost, since the verb *hunger* is only used metaphorically in present-day English. It is now a ‘verb of desire’ (Levin 1993). The same lexical evolution to a verb of desire can be observed for *thirst* which in its original intransitive usage referred to the state of being thirsty. Remarkably, however, the OED does not list any ergative uses for this verb which suggests that such uses have not been attested. Whether this is due to lack of historical data or not remains unclear at this point.

To sum up, the evolution of *starve* is a clear instance of ergativization of an originally intransitive verb; most likely, this evolution was triggered by the verb’s semantic narrowing to refer to a slow lingering death, which opened up the possibility to conceptualize this as an instigatable
event. Because of its lexical and constructional evolution, the verb has distinguished itself from its cognates in other Germanic languages (e.g. Dutch *sterven* or German *sterben*) which have continued the original meaning ('die') and construction types (core intransitive).

## 4.3 The ergativization of transitives

Another particularly interesting evolution is the ergativization of the transitive SUFFOCATE verbs. While this subgroup comprises both ergative members (*suffocate*, *choke*, etc.) and transitive members (*strangle*, *throttle*, *smother*), it has a strong ergative predilection, as already pointed out above. The OED data on the SUFFOCATE verbs indicate that their evolution is characterized by ample lexical and constructional overlapping. Roughly from late 16th century onwards, all SUFFOCATE verbs occur in ergative constructions, including the originally transitive verbs *strangle*, *throttle*, *stifle*, and *smother*. Consider the following examples:

(19) He could not lie down ... he should **strangle** (OED, 1662)

(20) I **smoother** with the smoake ... (OED, 1648)

(21) ... we are euery houre in danger of **stifling** (OED, 1594)

(22) She dyed without any Fever ... without **throatling**. (OED, 1687)

In all of these examples, the verbs *strangle*, *smother*, *stifle* and *throttle* are used in a non-causative construction which is no longer possible in contemporary English. The lexical and constructional proximity is also reflected in the recurrence of doublets, constructions where two verbs are paired via coordination (*V* and *V*), as in the following examples.

(23) Now shal he me **strangle and cheke** [=choke]... (OED, 1303)

(24) ... water **quencheth** & **cheketh** & **strangleth** feble fyre (OED, 1530)

(25) He that **stifles and smothers** his own prophecy (OED, 1687)

(26) ... the smoke may **stifle and choke** them ... (OED, 1601)

(27) ... doth the Sun his rayes ... **Smother or choke**? (OED, 1647)
Brook (1965) suggests that such doublets may often be used for
rhetorical or literary purposes, or they may have started out to facilitate
the understanding loanwords (e.g. *strangle* which comes from Old French
*estrangler* ‘choke, suffocate, throttle’), as if the writer wanted to gloss these
new verbs. However, the fact remains that such doublets continue to
be used in various forms in which, moreover, the order does not seem
to really matter; in addition, they often occur with indigenous English
verbs (e.g. *smother and choke*) as well, which weakens the suggestion that
they were (only) used to facilitate the understanding of loanwords. This
confirms that semantically as well as constructionally they had become
quite similar. The OED data suggests that the SUFFOCATE verbs displayed
a great deal of lexical interchangeability and constructional convergence
into a general ergative pattern. In some cases (e.g. *strangle*) the verb’s
lexical extension to refer general suffocation events has most likely paved
the way for a later ergativization. However, separating the lexical and
constructional dimension and asking which extension came first, seems
to be asking the wrong question (much like the chicken and the egg).
Rather, my view is that the lexical and constructional meaning are *inter-*
dependent. In most cases, semantic modulation is due to the dynamic
interplay of lexical and constructional meaning, in which it is no longer
clear what triggered what.

In any case, the high degree of lexical and constructional flexibility
of the SUFFOCATE verbs has decreased somewhat in their further evolution
to the present-day situation, which can roughly be characterized as a
process of reorientation towards their etymologically basic meanings (see
Lemmens 1998a: Ch.4 for further discussion).

## 4.4 Some particular paradigmatic changes

In this last section, we will consider some particular paradigmatic
changes which again reveal how lexical and constructional meaning
interact. The two cases that we will look at are *abort* and *throttle* (see
Lemmens 1998a,b for more detailed descriptions).

The constructional variability of present-day *abort* presents itself as a paradigmatic mix-up, as it displays both ergative and transitive characteristics. Consider the following examples which instantiate ergative patterns.

(28) the pilot ... was **aborting** the take-off moments before the crash

(29) The company had **aborted** a probe into fraud and waste

(30) The mission for peace **aborted** when one of the negotiators was shot dead.

(31) About 6% of bird collisions world-wide caused such emergencies as **aborted** take-offs and obscured visibility.

(32) Mr. Guber ... and Mr. Peters made an **aborted bid** to buy ...

As is typical of ergative verbs, *abort* allows the causative alternation. In addition, the past participle is ambiguous between an active and a passive reading: *an aborted bid* can be a bid that aborted or a bit that has been aborted. This, too, is typical of ergative verbs.

However, the verb also allows constructions that are typical of the transitive paradigm, as the objectless construction (see Lecture 3), as illustrated in the following (corpus) examples.

(33) Thus, a woman who used RU-486 to have an abortion would have to make ... a third trip a week later to make sure she has completely **aborted**.

(34) I assert that a mother has rights, and a baby does not. That being the case, the mother can **abort**, if she so chooses.

(35) Too many pregnant teenagers are urged to take the ‘easy way’ and **abort**, convinced by twisted logic that it is kinder to abort than to bear the child and place it for adoption.

(36) *The {fetus/child} **aborted** in the sixth week. (constructed example)

The last (constructed) example clearly shows that the non-causative construction is not possible, which is evidence that the ergative model is no longer instantiated, unlike what was suggested by the first set of
examples. How can this paradigmatic variation be explained? Again,
the answer lies in the diachronic evolution of the verb. We will be fairly
short here, but the gist of the story is that initially the verb *abort* (a loan
from Latin) referred to spontaneous miscarriages; in these events, the
fetus is conceptualized as co-participating in the event, or even primarily
responsible for it. In case of a spontaneous abortion (a miscarriage), the
woman (or anyone else) was not considered an Agent in control of the
event. An ergative conceptualization thus fits the event of a spontaneous
abortion quite nicely, since it attributes to the fetus the potential of self-
instigation the process. However, due to technological medical advances,
the verb came to be used to refer to an event that has become more
controlled, and thus more in line with a transitive conceptualization,
which casts the woman as an Agent, and the fetus (or pregnancy, in
more neutral coding) as the affected entity. The transitive objectless
constructions given above in fact maximize the focus on the woman at
the expense of the fetus which is now completely left out of the picture.
Notice that ethical and moral discussions ensure that the transitive
pattern almost irreversibly continues to entrench. In fact, people have
stopped using the verb *abort* (and derived forms) to denote a spontaneous
termination of a pregnancy and have instead resorted to more neutral
terms, such as *miscarry, have a miscarriage or lose one's baby*. However, for
the metaphorical uses, no such changes have occurred nor are there
any ideological or ethical issues to be considered; this explains why
the metaphorical uses have continued the earlier ergative patterns, as
illustrated above (e.g. *the take-off aborted vs. The pilot aborted the take-off*).

In sum, the verb *abort* presents itself as a paradigmatically split
verb where the literal uses (referring to the termination of a pregnancy)
have changed to a transitive construal of the event with the woman as
the controlling Agent (who thus, for those opposing abortion, can also
be held accountable for it), whereas the metaphorical uses continue
the earlier ergative uses, as shown by the possibility of the causative
alternation.
Another particular case that can be considered here to illustrate how semantic changes affect constructional possibilities is the verb *throttle* and in particular in the context of *throttle an engine*. In the 19th century, this usage was a metaphorical extension from the domain of suffocation (narrowing of the windpipe leading to shortage of air) to that of machines and engines, referring to decreasing the influx of combustible gasses or fluids into an engine (typically by narrowing a tubular duct conceived as similar to the windpipe), e.g.

(37) It would be better to use the steam expansively, rather than to **throttle** it by means of the regulator. (OED, 1875)

Two further semantic changes occurred. First of all, the verb extended its meaning from ‘decrease’ the influx to ‘regulate’ the influx (i.e. decrease or increase); secondly, there was a metonymic shift in profile from *throttle* [GAS] to *throttle* [ENGINE]. The latter change facilitated ergativization since engines can easily be conceived of as having an energy source of its own and thus the possibility of self-instigating the process. An ergative pattern with *throttle* is thus quite possible, e.g.

(38) a. ... he throttled down the diesel and pushed in the clutch ...
b. ... The diesel again throttled down to an idle ...

In literal uses (referring to suffocation), the verb *throttle* is invariably used transitively.

## 4.5 Concluding remarks

This lecture has given some examples of diachronic changes where lexical and constructional changes go hand in hand. Such changes have occasionally been discussed in the literature. Levin and Rappaport (1995) discuss ergativization (my term) of some intransitives (e.g. *The doctor bled the patient*) but regard this as ‘spurious causative pairs’, involving ‘two distinct verb meanings—one of them causative—that are not derivationally
related' (1995: 115). Halliday, in contrast, suggests that 'the coming of
[the ergative] pattern to predominance in the system of modern English
is one of a number of related developments that have been taking place
in the language over the past five hundred years or more' (1985: 146).
The ergativization of the SUFFOCATE verbs discussed above could be taken
as evidence for this claim, but some words of caution are in order. First
of all, as indicated, the semantics of these verbs (and their lexical overlap
illustrated above) may have facilitated the ergativization (which, moreover,
did not survive for all of them). Secondly, the case studies presented here,
based on data from the OED, are a mere onset of further, more elaborate
studies based on careful analysis of diachronic data where all verbs should
be considered. As far as we know, no such study has yet been done.

Recent research in Construction Grammar has argued, quite convincingly, that constructions have meaning. The lexical-paradigmatic approach that we have presented here is quite compatible with that view but adds two important elements. First of all, our analyses, and especially our diachronic studies, have shown that verb meaning plays an important role as well; Construction Grammar approaches tend to be pitched at too general a level. Secondly, we have added another explanatory layer which regroups certain constructions as instantiating either the transitive or ergative model of causation. It is the paradigmatic preferences of verbs (derived from usage) that may explain why certain constructions may not occur with certain verbs. A case in point is the non-occurrence of the objectless construction with (prototypically) ergative verbs, such as *starve* or *break*.

Clearly, language users often extend the prototypical paradigmatic
possibilities of verbs. In fact, there is no such thing as a 'transitive verb'
or an 'ergative verb'; there are only transitive or ergative constructions.
Frequent occurrence of a verb in a particular construction will lead to
a (prototypical) paradigmatic profile for that verb which often lines up
very well with its semantics. For example, the semantics of verbs such as
*murder, slay, assassinate*, etc. lines up very well with the Agent-centeredness
of the transitive paradigm. The semantic structure of the SUFFOCATE verbs, in turn, seem to line up more with an ergative construal of the event (non-perceptible cause, physical co-participation of the Theme, etc.). In more traditional terms, we could say that these constructions have become lexicalized for these different verbs. Even while some of these paradigmatic profiles may be very strong (e.g. it is quite unlikely that saliently transitive verbs like *kill*, or *murder* will easily ergativize), they are not absolute. Paradigmatic shifts can and do occur; they are nothing but new combinations of verbs and constructions that have been motivated by the larger context.

## Notes

1. Recall that in the Hallidayan model, these two roles are called *Actor* and *Goal* respectively; to avoid confusion, we have preserved to more traditional terms.
<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>
# A cognitive lexical semantic analysis of posture verbs

## 5.1 Introduction

This lecture will be about my work on posture and placement verbs that I have been working on for the last decade.¹ Simplistically put, posture verbs are verbs that express posture of human being; typically, there are three human postures that are considered basic: sitting, lying and standing. We will therefore follow Newman’s view that the verbs SIT, LIE and STAND are cardinal posture verbs.² As we will see, in many languages these posture verbs are also used to talk about the locations of non-animate entities. Moreover, in some other languages, these verbs have further evolved to grammatical markers, often marking aspect (progressive, durative, habitual, etc.). We will talk more about such grammaticalized uses in Lecture 7.

Dutch is one of the languages that has extended the use of posture verbs quite a bit. Even for speakers of related languages, such as English (also a Germanic language), the use of Dutch posture verbs can be quite strange and puzzling. By way of example, we could cite one of the former US ambassadors to Belgium, Howard Gutman, who in an interview said the following³:
Give me 100 rules that I can change and I'll make the Dutch language easier. [...] Dutch is extremely difficult. Take for example *The tafel ligt vol boeken* ('the table lies full (of) books'): according to me, that is the most difficult sentence on the whole planet! Not the table lies, but the books! To me, this is totally absurd.

While I sympathize with Gutman's struggles with the Dutch language, I (obviously) strongly disagree with his claim that this is absurd or that it makes the Dutch language more difficult than any other language. Surely, in the example that he cites, it is not the entity referred to by the subject NP (the table) that is lying, but the books. This construction is called a setting construction, where the subject expresses the location where a given event takes place. In fact, one is surprised at the difficulty that Gutman says he has with this, given that such constructions are quite common in English, e.g. *The garden is swarming with bees* or *My cat is crawling with flees or This hotel sleeps 50 guests*. In these sentences, the garden, the cat, and the hotel are the locations where the actions (swarming, crawling, sleeping) take place. Perhaps, his difficulty was not so much with the setting construction, but rather the use of the verb *liggen* 'lie', which takes me back to the topic of posture verbs. To further illustrate the (extensive) uses of posture verbs in Dutch, consider the following English translation of a possible Dutch description of a dinner scene where I have preserved all the posture verbs of the original description in the translation (which makes it quite un-English).

(1) Fancy dinner plates **stood** on the table; the silver knives and folks **lay** beside them; red candles **stood to burn** on both ends of the table. Next to them **stood** two dusty bottles; in these there surely **sat** exquisite wine. Gold-laced napkins which **sat** snugly in sliver rings **lay** next to each plate. The salt **stood** on the table but some of it **lay** on the tablecloth where wine stains must have **sat**.

In English, this text would be highly unidiomatic precisely because
of the use of *lie*, *sit* or *stand* which, however, must be used in Dutch. To
make things even more complicated consider the following examples.

(2) er **stond** een nieuwe BMW 5 voor het huis; die wagens **liggen** goed op de weg

there **stood** a new BMW 5 in front of the house, these cars **lie** well on the road (= holds the road well)

(3) er **stonden / zaten** er geen nieuwe ideeën in het boek.

there **stood / sat** no new ideas in the book

These sentences illustrate some intriguing coding variations: a car
can be said to ‘stand’, sometimes, to ‘lie’; ideas can either ‘stand’ or ‘sit’
in a book. How can this variation be explained? This lecture will give
a more detailed account of the well-motivated use of posture verbs in
Dutch. While some of the description is perhaps specific to Dutch, many
languages do similar things and the description offered here can find
equivalents in other languages.

In what follows, I will describe the general patterns of use of
the three cardinal posture verbs in Dutch; this is the semasiological
perspective, i.e. a study of the range of meanings of these linguistic
expressions. In the course of the discussion, we will also consider the
coding variation (as illustrated above) which implies an onomasiological
perspective that considers which linguistic expressions are being used
to express a certain (spatial) reality. Next, we will be looking at some
learner errors by francophone learners of Dutch. In the last part of this
lecture, we will briefly consider the use of posture verbs in some other
languages.

## 5.2 A cognitive account of (Dutch) posture verbs

Dutch is a Germanic language, just like English, German, and
Swedish. Given their common ancestry, it is no surprise that they all use
the cardinal posture verbs. Consider the following examples for three
Germanic languages (i) to refer to human beings in one of the three positions (example 4 and 5), (ii) to express the location of concrete objects (example 6 and 7), (iii) or to refer to metaphorical 'location' (example 8). We have added French, a Romance language, for contrastive purposes, as it allows the use of posture verbs only to refer to human posture. French also differs from the Germanic languages in coding this with a participle construction, a point to which we will return in Lecture 6 (section 6.2).

**POSTURAL** uses (human posture):

<table><tr><td>(4) a. The man</td><td><b>lay</b></td><td>on the bed. (Eng.)</td></tr><tr><td>b. De man</td><td><b>lag</b></td><td>op het bed. (Du.)</td></tr><tr><td>c. Mannen</td><td><b>låg</b></td><td>på sängen. (Sw.)</td></tr><tr><td>d. L'homme</td><td><b>était couché</b></td><td>sur le lit. (Fr.)</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>(5) a. The girl</td><td><b>sat</b></td><td>on the chair. (Eng.)</td></tr><tr><td>b. Het meisje</td><td><b>zat</b></td><td>op de stoel. (Du.)</td></tr><tr><td>c. Flickan</td><td><b>satt</b></td><td>på stolen. (Sw.)</td></tr><tr><td>d. La fille</td><td><b>était assise</b></td><td>sur la chaise. (Fr.; lit. 'was seated')</td></tr></table>

**LOCATIONAL** uses (location in physical space of any concrete entity)

<table><tr><td>(6) a. The clothes</td><td><b>lie</b></td><td>on the bed. (Eng.)</td></tr><tr><td>b. De kleren</td><td><b>liggen</b></td><td>op het bed. (Du.)</td></tr><tr><td>c. Kläderna</td><td><b>ligger</b></td><td>på sängen. (Sw.)</td></tr><tr><td>d. *Les vêtements</td><td><b>sont couchés</b></td><td>sur le lit. (Fr.; lit. 'are laid')</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>(7) a. The car</td><td><b>stood</b></td><td>in front of the house. (Eng.)</td></tr><tr><td>b. De auto</td><td><b>stond</b></td><td>voor het huis. (Du.)</td></tr><tr><td>c. Bilen</td><td><b>stod</b></td><td>framför huset. (Sw.)</td></tr><tr><td>d. *La voiture</td><td><b>était debout</b></td><td>devant la maison. (Fr.; lit. 'was upright')</td></tr></table>

**METAPHORICAL** uses / **idioms** (non-spatial)

<table><tr><td>(8) a. The causes that <b>lie</b> at the basis of the problem ... (Eng.)</td></tr><tr><td>b. De oorzaken die aan de basis <b>liggen</b> van het probleem ... (Du.)</td></tr><tr><td>c. Ursakerna som <b>ligger</b> bakom problemet ... (Sw.)</td></tr><tr><td>d. *Les causes qui <b>sont couchées</b> derrières le problème. (Fr.)</td></tr></table>
Even though they are closely related, there are interesting differences between the Germanic languages as illustrated in examples 9 to 12. The Germanic languages vary in seemingly strange ways when it comes to the use of posture verbs: in Dutch, money is said to ‘stand’ on the bank account, in Swedish, it is said to ‘sit’. And where Dutch uses the verb *zitten* ‘sit’ to express the location of the wine in the bottle, the use of this verb would be ungrammatical in Swedish. In Dutch, a laptop is said to ‘stand’ on the table, in English, it is said to ‘sit’ (if a posture verb is used at all).

(9) a. Hij **zit** op zijn knieën. (Dutch: ‘sit’)

b. Han **står** på knäna. (Swedish: ‘stand’)

he sits / stands on his knees

(10) a. De wijn **zit** in de fles. (Dutch: ‘sit’)

b. Vinet **\*sitter** i flaskan. (Swedish: *sit)

the wine is (sits) in the bottle

(11) a. My laptop is **sitting** on the desk. (English: ‘sit’)

b. Mijn laptop **staat** op het bureau. (Dutch: ‘stand’)

(12) a. Het geld **staat** ergens op een bankrekening. (Dutch: ‘stand’)

b. Pengarna **sitter** på ett bankkonto. (Swedish: ‘sit’)

money stands / sits on a bank account

As will become clear later on, these variations are not all that strange, but imply a different conceptualization of the same reality. Moreover, the different Germanic languages do not seem to be committed to the use of posture verbs to the same degree. As shown in the examples below, Dutch is most committed to this use, whereas English is least committed to it; overall, it prefers the use of the neutral verb *be* which often is ungrammatical (or highly unidiomatic) in Dutch.

(13) a. I **{stand / am}** in line in the store.

b. Ik **{sta / \*ben}** in de rij in de winkel.

c. Jag **{star / \*är}** i kön i affären.

(14) a. The book **{is lying / is}** on the table.

b. Het boek **{ligt / \*is}** op de tafel.
c. Boken {ligger / *är} på bordet.

(15) a. He {*sits / is} in prison. (prisoner not sitting)

b. Hij {zit / *is} in de gevangenis. (idem)

c. Han {sitter / *är} i fängelse. (idem)

(16) a. an artistic feeling that *sits / is in your fingers

b. een kunstenaarsgevoel, dat in de vingers zit / *is

c. en konstnärlig känsla, som sitter / *är i fingertopparna

Overall, in Dutch, whenever you want to express the location of an entity, there is a fairly strong obligation to use a posture verb. We will come back to that below. In addition to this coding obligation, there is also a large coding variation in Dutch; this was already illustrated above, but example (17) gives some additional examples.

(17) a. De boter **ligt / staat / zit** in de koelkast. ‘the butter lies/stands/
sits in the fridge’

b. Het zout **ligt / staat / *zit** op tafel. ‘the salt lies/stands on the
table’

c. Ik **sta / zit / *lig** in de file. ‘I stand/sit in the traffic jam’

d. De kerk **staat / ligt / *zit** op een heuvel. ‘the church stands/lies
on a hill’

Importantly, with the exception of 17b, the choice of verb is independent of the reality being described, as they can refer to the very same situation: the butter in the fridge, the I-person in a traffic jam, or the church on the hill. As with the inter-Germanic differences above, these variations imply a different conceptualization of that same reality. This is again a point that we will return to below.

My cognitive analysis of posture verbs argues that these verbs denote a semantic network structured around a prototype (cf. Lecture 1). The conceptual prototypes for the three posture verbs are the three basic human postures sitting, lying and standing. The prototypes themselves are actually clusters of characteristics which can be summarized as in Table 11.
<table><caption>Table 11. Experiential prototype clusters for CPVs (adapted from Newman 2002b)</caption><thead><tr><th>staan ('stand')</th><th>liggen ('lie')</th><th>zitten ('sit')</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>(i) canonical position<br>(ii) maximally vertical<br>(iii) resting on feet<br>('stand-side')</td><td>non-canonical position<br>maximally horizontal<br>resting on back<br>('side-side')</td><td>non-canonical position<br>[vertic.] & [horiz.]<br>resting on buttocks<br>('sit-side')</td></tr><tr><td>(iv) physical effort to<br>sustain</td><td>no physical effort to<br>sustain</td><td>some physical effort to<br>sustain</td></tr><tr><td>(v) (start) position for<br>walking</td><td>position for resting</td><td>position for deskwork and<br>active rest</td></tr><tr><td>(vi) associations: power<br>and control</td><td>associations: rest,<br>weakness, illness, death</td><td>associations: active rest,<br>stability, fixed</td></tr></tbody></table>

The prototype for *staan* ‘stand’ comprises a number of features: it is the canonical position of a human being, resting on its feet, and thus also maximally vertical.⁴ Some energy is required to maintain this posture (which also requires balance). The standing position is also the start position for walking (upright), probably the most prototypical human movement. There are also some other associations with a standing position, as it typically gives you most power and control (more than when lying or sitting), you see better (since you are taller) and you will be seen more easily (for the same reason).

*Liggen* ('lie') provides the maximal opposition to standing: it is a non-canonical position of human beings, they are maximally horizontal, typically resting on their back but it could be on any side. There is no effort required to maintain this posture, it is in fact the position that is associated with maximal rest, and by extension it comes to be associated with (total) inactivity, weakness, illness and death.

*Zitten* ‘sit’ is somewhat in between the two: it is neither vertical nor horizontal and there is some effort to maintain this position, but not as much as for standing. It is, in fact, the position used for some (common) activities like desk work, reading, writing, having meetings, watching a
theatre play, etc. This is what is meant with ‘active rest’. Sitting is also associated with stability, especially compared to standing and lying. As said, standing requires some effort to maintain balance and not to fall; for lying, it is also fairly easy to roll over (sideways). However, when sitting, it is more difficult to get destabilized; often one is even partly contained, e.g. in a sofa or chair with armrests. As we will show, the idea of being snugly positioned and (partially) contained will be quite important for the use of Dutch *zitten*.

It deserves to be pointed out that, at least for Dutch, the three cardinal posture verbs may refer to a variety of human postures. For example, *staan* ‘stand’ will be used when you are on your feet, but it can also be used when you are ‘standing’ on your head, or leaning against a wall (which adds a secondary contact point). Mostly, a modifier will be added to distinguish these contexts from regular standing, e.g. *op je hoofd staan* (‘stand on your head’). Similarly, as shown in Figure 8, while Dutch *zitten* ‘sit’ prototypically refers to a particular posture, (i) in Figure 8, the verb is often used (again, with additional modifiers) to refer to being on your knees (‘sit on your knees’), squatting (‘sit on your haunches’), be on all fours (‘sit on hands and feet’), etc. In other words, in Dutch, the expressions for these different postures build on the three cardinal posture verbs (CPV + modifier), even if there exist specific verbs as well (comparable to English *kneel*, *squat*, or *lean*). In some languages, different verbs are to be used altogether for all of these different positions.

As indicated, Dutch posture verbs have extended their usage to express the spatial location of inanimate entities; these extensions are based on image schemas, abstract representations based on our daily spatial experiences. In other words, they are ‘patterns of bodily experience [which] emerge throughout sensorimotor activity as we manipulate objects, orient ourselves spatially and temporally, and direct our perceptual focus for various purposes’ (Gibbs et al. 1994: 233). In what follows, we will discuss the image schematic extension for the three different verbs as well as their metaphorical uses that are based on these.
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8. Different ‘sitting’ postures possible with Dutch *zitten* ‘sit’</figcaption></figure>

*Staan* ‘stand’

The image schema that motivates the locational uses of *staan* ‘stand’ is the image of an entity resting on its ‘feet’, or in more general terms, on its **base**, as represented in Figure 9. It is the notion of a base that is crucial here (highlighted via a thicker line in the figure), much more so than verticality in the real world. We follow Serra Borneto’s (1996) hypothesis that the presence of a base (or rather, the perception of it) triggers a mental scanning upwards which motivates the use of *staan* ‘stand’. Verticality thus becomes a cognitive notion rather than referring to the real dimensions in the world ‘out there’.

In the typical case, being vertical and being on one’s base coincide (as in the second box in Figure 9), but this need not be so. This explains why plates on the table, while clearly more horizontal than vertical, are said to be standing in Dutch when in their functional position, since they are
<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9. Simplified schematic network for *stand*</figcaption></figure>

resting on their base. Any object that is located on its base (e.g. computers, telephones, beds, plates, cups, pots, pans, shoes, boxes, buildings, etc.) will be coded with *staan* 'stand'. The key is always the presence of a base on which the entity rests (stage 3 in Figure 9). Strikingly, once the image of a base is in place, as well as the mental scanning that it implies (upward from the base), it is possible to mentally rotate this image (image schematic transformation), where the mental scanning can be in any direction (i.e. not just vertical), such as branches that are said to be 'standing' on the trees, or a moustache 'standing' sideways. In these contexts, *staan* 'stand' basically means 'extend away from origin' (stage 4 in Figure 9). This also explains why in Dutch, as in English, you can say that the wind *stands* east: the image here is that the wind finds its origin in the east and there is a mental scanning away from that origin.

Verticality as a real-world dimension only comes in when the object does not have a base or when it is not resting on its base. For example, a book does not have a base, so when it is located on the shelf, its real dimensions (actual orientation) will determine whether *staan* 'stand' is to be used (upright on its smallest side) or *liggen* 'lie' (horizontally resting on its widest side). Similarly, when a bottle (which has a base) is not resting on its base, its orientation will determine the choice of verb: *staan* 'stand' if it is upside down (where one would have to add a modifier to clarify the situation, such as on its head or upside down in English) or *liggen* 'lie' if it is on its side.

The idea of being on a base is also related to the idea of functionality:
an entity on its base is also in its most functional position. This association
is already present in the prototype of a human being in standing position:
when you are standing, you are in a most functional position, for a variety
of actions. One of these is walking. In other words, standing is the start
position for walking, and by extension, any kind of movement. It thus
comes as no surprise that the verb is used in all kinds of expressions that
relate to 'being ready to go' (example 18a), or by extension 'ready to act'
(example 18b).⁵

(18) a. Ik **sta** klaar om te vertrekken.
I stand ready to leave (= I am ready to leave)
b. Ik **sta** klaar om je te helpen.
I stand ready to help you (= I am ready to help you)

Similarly, the verb *staan* ‘stand’ is used to express ingressive aspect,
i.e. that something is about to happen, which typically occurs in two
frequent expressions: *op het punt staan* ‘stand on the point of’ and *staan te
gebeuren* ‘stand to happen’.

Another association that motivates metaphorical uses of *staan* ‘stand’
concerns notion of control, balance or support, which is also relevant
for English *stand* (cf. Gibbs et al. 1994 and Gibbs 2002). This is what
motivates uses such as the following.

(19) a. Ik **sta** helemaal achter zijn zaak.
I stand completely behind his case
b. De campagne **staat** of valt met zijn charisma.
the campaign stands or falls with his charisma

In some contexts, *staan* ‘stand’ merely refers to the default position
of a human being and does not strongly link up with actual standing, as in
the following example.

(20) a. Ik **sta** er helemaal buiten.
I stand there completely outside (= ‘have nothing to do with it’)

I stand ready to leave (= I am ready to leave)

b. Ik **sta** klaar om je te helpen.

I stand ready to help you (= I am ready to help you)

I stand completely behind his case

b. De campagne **staat** of valt met zijn charisma.

the campaign stands or falls with his charisma
b. Hij **staat** er positief tegenover
   he stands positive towards it (= 'approves of it')

There may be a mild suggestion of maintaining a particular position,
but this is very much backgrounded here. The verb basically means 'being
positioned in its default position'. Such semantic bleaching could also be the
explanation underlying the verb *bestaan* 'exist' (etymologically prefix *be* +
*staan*, cognate with German *bestehen* and Swedish *bestå*); for *bestaan*, the link
with the verb *staan* 'stand' has, however, become totally opaque.

One particular highly frequent and productive usage of *staan* 'stand'
concerns printed text: in Dutch, any written or printed text is said to be
standing, illustrated in the following example.

(21) a. Wat **staat** er op deze bladzijde?
what stands there on this page?

b. Het **staat** allemaal in mijn hand-out
it stands all in my hand-out

The motivation behind this use is probably no longer transparent
even to native speakers; nevertheless, two converging factors can still be
attributed some motivating force (and this regardless of whether they
are etymologically accurate). First, there is the image of text 'standing'
on the supporting paper, as if in relief. In order to be readable, letters
must be placed on their flat side, which thus becomes their base. The
mental scanning vector is thus from the paper upwards to the top surface
of the printed letter. Second, letters can be seen as 'standing' on (visible
or invisible) horizontal lines on the paper. Hence, you write *on* the line,
the letters have a height. The mental scanning vector is thus different,
perpendicular to the previous one, going from the bottom of the line to
the top of the letter.

Whatever its motivation, it is clear that this usage has become highly
entrenched to the extent that it has laid the basis for extensions to all kinds
of imprints (including non-textual ones), of either temporal or permanent
nature, such as pictures in a book, words engraved on a stone, text or icons on a screen, or even marks on the body (tattoos but also rash). All of these are typically coded with *staan* 'stand' (sometimes it is even obligatory to use *staan*). Within the prototypically structured radial network encoded by *staan*, this usage could be characterized as a local prototype from which new uses extend. Some of these can be quite remote from printed text, such as songs said to 'stand' on a CD, as they are conceptualized as being engraved on it. Or consider files on my computer or on the Internet whose location is also expressed with *staan* 'stand', as if they are printed. Strikingly, in Swedish, texts or files on the Internet are said to be 'lying', since they are conceptualized as a paper or document whose location is typically expressed as lying, as discussed next.

### Liggen 'lie'

The verb *liggen* 'lie' is in many ways the opposite of *staan* 'stand'. Horizontality is much more important for *liggen* 'lie' than verticality is for *staan* 'stand'. As shown in Figure 10, this horizontality manifests itself in different types. Two large categories of horizontal objects can be distinguished, LINE types and SHEET types, which are maximally distinct in their prototypes but share a transitional zone (small boards, for example, are conceivable as wide lines yet also as small elongated sheets). It goes without saying that entities perceived as having a LINE-like or SHEET-like shape will be coded with *liggen* 'lie'. For example, the location of roads and rivers is typically expressed with this verb, because they are like lines or ribbons. Similarly, frontiers are said to 'lie', since even if they are invisible, they are conceived of as lines. Within the SHEET category are also included different kinds of tissues (e.g. clothes, towels, etc.) and substances (e.g. liquids, sand, etc.), since they are non-rigid objects that naturally take a horizontal expansion under their own gravitational weight. For example, the difference in example 17b above between *Het zout ligt op tafel* and *Het zout staat op tafel* ('The salt stands/lies on the table') is thus metonymical: in the first case, *liggen* 'lie' refers to the salt
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /><figcaption>Figure 10. Semantic extensions for lie</figcaption></figure>

as substance which, unconstrained by any fixed boundaries, will flatten
out on the table; in the second case, *staan* 'stand' shifts the focus from the
substance itself to the saltshaker (itself left implicit, however), positioned
on its base, and thus in a 'standing' position.

As already mentioned above, horizontality also comes into play when
an entity that has a base is, however, not resting on that base (righthand
side of Figure 10). This does not mean, however, that horizontality is
absolute. For example, a car on its wheels will logically be coded with
*staan* 'stand' (on its base and in functional position), but when it is on its
side, its position will be coded with *liggen* 'lie', even if in that position it
may actually be higher (i.e. more vertical) than when it is on its wheels.
Basically, *liggen* 'lie' expresses 'not on its base and thus not in functional
position'. The notion of functionality is a factor that distinguishes *staan*
[+functional position] from *liggen* [-functional position]. For example,
my (open) laptop on the desk would be coded with *staan* 'stand' since it is
in its canonical functional position on its base; however, if that same open
laptop is placed on the bed, its functionality is (partially) affected, and a
coding with *liggen* 'lie' becomes an alternative (even preferred) choice. If
the laptop is closed and placed on the bed, a coding with *liggen* 'lie' even
becomes the obligatory coding.

One of the particularities of Dutch (but something one finds in
other languages as well) is that it has conventionalized the verb *liggen* to
encode the location of symmetrical entities, such as balls, cubes, or wads (marked as ‘DIM-LESS’ in Figure 10). These objects can be characterized by a ‘lack of dimensional salience’ as Serra Borneto (1996) correctly observes for German *liegen* ‘lie’, perfectly similar to Dutch in this context. He points out how in the absence of dimensional differentiation there is no mental tracing away from the origin that one has with vertical objects or objects resting on their base.

The ‘dimension-less’ use of *liggen* ‘lie’ motivates a number of metaphorical extensions concerning the ‘location’ of abstract entities. We are not referring here to the cases where these abstract entities are saliently associated with a particular (horizontal) form, as may be the case for example with frontiers or connections conceived as lines (compare with English *Where does the connection lie between these singular events?*), or foundations as horizontal supports (compare with English *the underlying basis*), or points as round objects (compare with English *The point lies between 1 and 1*). The abstract uses that we are concerned with here are those entities that seem to lack such imagery, as in the following examples.

(22) a. De verantwoordelijkheid **ligt** bij jou.

the responsibility *lies* with you

b. Deze aanklacht **ligt** gevoelig.

this complaint *lies* sensitive (= it is a sensitive issue)

c. De oorzaken **liggen** in het verleden.

the causes *lie* in the past

Several motivations can in fact be offered for the use of *liggen*
‘lie’ in these contexts. A plausible explanation is that these ‘shapeless’
abstract entities trigger a default location event for which, as Talmy
(2000,I: 186) has pointed out, a point location predominates, i.e. in the
absence of indications to the contrary we are dealing here with point-
like Figures. Talmy advances this hypothesis for closed class items (in
his case, prepositions), but in the absence of shape specification as
we have here, this hypothesis may very well hold. As said, points are
typically conceptualized as round objects, triggering a coding with *liggen* 'lie'. Another motivation may be that abstract entities are generally not attributed the power to sustain themselves and thus would be more like non-rigid entities (Sally Rice, pers. com.). A third factor that may contribute to the appropriateness of the coding is that in many cases these (shapeless) abstract entities are a 'burden' (mortgage, responsibility, burden, etc.) which can be thought of as covering and pressing down the Ground. The triple motivation contributes to the appropriateness of the coding, at least within the powerful 'postural logic' conventionalized in Dutch and routinely applied by its speakers.

A last extension to be mentioned here is the common use of *liggen*
'lie' to express what Serra Borneto (1996) has called 'geotopographical
location', which concerns the location of entities that are typically
conceived of as locations themselves, such as buildings, cities, villages,
etc. In these contexts, one talks about the location of these entities,
perceived as a **SHEET**-like entity. The coding variation in example (17)d
above ('the church stands/lies on a hill') can thus be explained: the use
of *staan* 'stand' entails a 3D conceptualization of the church as a building
which is located on its base (and is additionally vertical); the use of *liggen*
'lie' entails a 2D conceptualization, which is only concerned with the
(**SHEET**-like) surface occupied by the church.

Zitten ‘sit’

As said above, even in the postural domain, the verb *zitten* ‘sit’ covers
a considerable variety of postures (see Figure 8 above). A first point to be
made here is that some of these postures (like squatting or being on all fours)
are perceived as resembling those of smaller animals, such as mice, rabbits,
birds or frogs. Consequently, even though these animals are on their feet,
their position is still habitually expressed by the verb *zitten* ‘sit’, referring to a
posture with bent hind legs and the buttocks close to the ground.

A second point that can be made is that the variation in the postural
domain may have facilitated the extension of zitten ‘sit’ to contexts where
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 11.** Metonymic extensions for CONTAINMENT and CONTACT *zitten*</figcaption></figure>

posture is no longer at issue. The two most important extensions are what we conveniently label CONTAINMENT-*zitten* and CONTACT-*zitten* which are metonymically related to the verb’s prototype, as diagrammed in Figure 11.

When you are sitting in a chair or sofa you are often snugly contained by the chair. There is close contact with the chair which creates stability. This has motivated extended uses of *zitten* 'sit' to contexts where there is partial (but close) containment, such as a nail said to be 'sitting' in the wall. In other contexts, you have full (and typically close) containment. In the case of CONTAINMENT-*zitten*, the verb no longer encodes posture but merely situates the entity as (closely) contained by a container. Hence the use of *zitten* to refer to water in a bottle, money in your pocket, dust in your hair, a CD in a CD-case, etc., but also people 'sitting' in prison. The latter is particularly relevant: the use of *zitten* 'sit' to refer to people in prison has no more reference to posture (they sit, lie and stand there), but exclusively refers to (close) containment (being locked up). Interestingly, if people are merely visiting the prison, you would use the verb *zijn* 'be' ('I am in prison').

When used with inanimate entities, the contexts usually concern close containment or cases where the position of the contained entity depends on that of the container. A typical illustration of this is a CD in a CD-case which is not only closely contained, but also, its position will change with that of the container. The larger the container, the more
likely it is that a posture verb will be used referring to precise location of the contained entity. For example, shoes in a shop window display will be said to ‘stand’ (canonical position on their base) rather than to ‘sit’, since the display window is quite large. Conversely, when the shoes are in a shoe box, they are closely contained and typically *zitten* ‘sit’ will be used here (even when they are on their base). Logically, *zitten* ‘sit’ is also typically used when the contained entity is hidden from sight, but also this is not an absolute rule. For example, the location of towels in a drawer can be expressed by either *liggen* ‘lie’ (default position of non-rigid objects) or *zitten* ‘sit’ (focusing on containment).

As can be expected, *zitten* ‘sit’ is also often used when metaphorical containment is at issue, as in the following examples.

(23) a. Ik **zit** in de problemen.
I sit in the problems (= I have (serious) problems)
b. Het gokken **zit** de Britten in het bloed.
the gambling sits the Brits in the blood
c. De idee **zit** in de tekst.
the idea sits in the text

In all these cases, there is the conceptualization of a containment: the multitude of problems are seen as a container in which the I-person is stuck, the abstract notion of gambling is conceptualized as being contained in the blood much like a virus (a real virus in the blood would also be coded with *zitten* ‘sit’ in Dutch), and a text can be conceptualized as a container with the ideas as objects contained in it. In other words, any type of situation that can be conceptualized as (close) containment can be, and typically is, expressed by *zitten* ‘sit’. As said, this is a matter of conceptualization, and one and the same reality may sometimes be conceptualized in alternate ways. For instance, an idea in a text can be conceptualized in terms of containment as in the example above, but via regular metonymy, it may also be seen as being printed text; in that case, one would use *staan* ‘stand’: *de idee staat in de tekst* ‘the idea stands in the
text' (see, for instance, example 3 above).

Close containment often involves close contact. In some cases, (close) contact or the idea of being stuck is all that remains, as shown by the following examples.

(24) a. Ik **zit** in de file.
I sit in the traffic jam (contained and stuck in it)
b. Ik **zit** (vast) op de luchthaven.
I sit (fixed) at the airport (= I'm stuck, stranded)

(25) a. Deze schroef **zit** goed vast.
this screw sits well attached (= is tight)
b. Dit meubel **zit** vast met lijm.
this piece of furniture sits attached with glue (= is firmly glued together)

We can wrap up the discussion on the use of Dutch posture verbs by taking up some of the coding variations mentioned earlier that have not yet been discussed. One of these is given in example 17, where butter is said to be 'lying', 'sitting' or 'standing' in the fridge. It may now be clear how each of the choices implies a different conceptualization of what may very well be the same reality. The coding with *liggen* 'lie' sees this as a package of butter that has no base, and typically is resting horizontally on its widest side; a coding with *staan* 'stand' metonymically refers to the butter in a butter dish (of some sort) that has a base on which it rests; a coding with *zitten* 'sit' in fact abstracts away from the position of the entity and merely focuses on its being contained in the fridge.

Example 2 concerns a variation in the coding for a car. In the typical case, a car is said to ‘stand’ (on the road or in the garage) given that it is in its canonical functional position, resting on its wheels. When it is not on its wheels, *liggen* ‘lie’ will mostly be used, as already mentioned. However, as example 2 shows, the verb *liggen* ‘lie’ can also be used in one particular context, when the car is on its wheels but moving; in Dutch you will then say that the car ‘lies’ well on the road, meaning that it holds the road very
well (i.e. does not skid easily). Crucially, in this context, the (originally
static) verb *liggen* ‘lie’ is used to refer to a context of motion: the car
keeps its position on the road while moving. The use of *liggen* ‘lie’ is
motivated by a more *SHEET*-like perception of the moving car maintaining
its horizontal position rather than tilting vertically (e.g. on two wheels
instead of four).

## 5.3 A look at learner language

The extensive use of Dutch posture verbs as described above are
a notorious problem for L2 learners of Dutch, especially if their own
language does not have such uses. One such language is French, which
does have posture verbs, but tends not to use it, even not when referring
to people. Mostly, a general verb (like *être* 'be') will be used (see for
instance examples 4 to 8 above); such a neutral verb is, however, not
idiomatic in Dutch where a posture verb has to be used. The difficulties
that French learners of Dutch have with the correct use of the posture
verbs can be situated on three levels: (i) the semasiological extension of
posture verbs (their extensive semantic coverage), (ii) the onomasiological
flexibility, which refers to the coding variations discussed above, and
(iii) the obligation to use a posture verb instead of a neutral verb. The
latter implies that they have to learn a one-to-many mapping: one verb
in their native language French (*être* 'be') corresponds to three different
verbs in Dutch (*liggen* 'lie', *zitten* 'sit' and *staan* 'stand'). As has been shown
in the literature (e.g. Viberg 1998; Pavlenko and Driagina, 2007), this
kind of mapping seems particularly difficult. Phrased in Narasimhan and
Gullberg's (2011) terms, the factors that play a role here are (i) L2 input
frequency, which is very high for Dutch posture verbs, and (ii) semantic
transparency, which given the semasiological and onomasiological
variation is undoubtedly quite opaque to the French learners.

In one of our studies (Lemmens and Perrez 2010), we have looked at
how Belgian francophone learners of Dutch use posture verbs in written
essays. (We will come back to oral language in Lecture 9). The general findings are as follows. First of all, as can be expected, the francophone learners overall underuse the posture verbs and overuse the verb *zijn* 'be'; this is a clear interference from the patterns of use in their native language. A second observation is that they nevertheless occasionally overuse posture verbs, i.e. that they use the verb in contexts where they cannot be used. Consider the following sentences from the learner corpus that we have analyzed for this study.

(26) a. De vrouw ***staat** een beetje wanhopig omdat ze wilde dat haar man de tuintrap verft.⁶

the woman stands a bit desperate because she wanted her husband to paint the gardensteps

b. Geachte Vrouw, Hier ***zit** de resultaten van mijn verslag.

dear woman (sic), here sits the result of my report

In both cases, the use of a posture verb is inappropriate; the verb *zijn* 'be' has to be used. While one can make a calculated guess as to what triggered the learners to use the particular posture verb in the contexts at hand (the default posture for human beings leading to *staan* 'stand' in the a-sentence and the idea of containment in the b-sentence), the unidiomatic use results from what we have termed 'posture verb panic': learners know that in Dutch posture verbs are to be used, so they start to overgeneralize, and use them in contexts where they are not (or no longer) allowed.

A third general finding is that francophone learners get confused by the different uses of the posture verbs, which we have called ‘posture verb confusion’. These confusions are particularly interesting as they reveal what patterns the L2 learners have internalized and how they may overextend these. We limit the present discussion to two (well-entrenched) contexts of use, that of written text (for which *staan* ‘stand’) is to be used and that of geotopographical location, for which *liggen* ‘lie’ is to be used.

The L2 speakers in our study seem to be sufficiently familiar with the Dutch convention of using *staan* ‘stand’ to refer to written text, as it is
used correctly in 55 occurrences, which amounts to 31% of their correct uses of the verb. At the same time, there are a number of cases where this context leads to unidiomatic uses, either because *staan* ‘stand’ is not being used or because *staan* ‘stand’ is used incorrectly (overextension). Let us begin with the first case; here is one of the L2-examples, making a metalinguistic comment on the phrase *zotte mensen* ‘crazy people’.

(27) ‘Zotte mensen’ *zit* ook tussen aanhalingstekens omdat het een uitdrukking van het meisje is.
‘crazy people’ sits also between quotation marks because it is the expression of (=used by) the girl

The learner’s choice for *zitten* ‘sit’ is not without motivation, as the phrase talked about can be conceptualized as being ‘closely contained’ by the quotation marks; however, talking about the graphemic (printed) representation of language renders a coding with *staan* ‘stand’ compulsory. At the same time, the strong obligation can lead to (subtle) errors as well, as is the case for the following example, where the learner inappropriately overextends that use of *staan* ‘stand’:

(28) Er ?*staat* een bijbedoeling in de zin die op een verschillende manier geïnterpreteerd zal worden
there stands a hidden intention in the sentence that will be interpreted in a different way

At first glance, nothing seems wrong with this example, since the learner is talking about the (printed) text that will be interpreted differently. However, the formulation is not idiomatic, since a hidden intention is not really orthographically expressed, unlike what is the case with straightforward meanings, where this metonymy does apply. In other words, *staan* ‘stand’ used to refer to ideas expressed by (printed) text can only be used if the metonymic link between the text and its meaning is overt; that is not the case with the hidden intention or meaning in the example above. A coding with *zitten* ‘sit’ expressing containment (the
hidden meaning) would thus have been more idiomatic.

Despite the fact that basically any text can be conceptualized as a container
which has meaning(s) ‘sitting’ in it, there are certain conventionalized
collocations, as becomes apparent from the following L2-error, where the
learner is talking about the information in newspapers.

(29) Maar als je [die kranten] eens koopt, ontdekt je dat daar niets in
*zit
but when you buy [these newspapers], you discover that there sits
nothing in them

Apparently, this learner has mastered the usage of *zitten* ‘sit’ to refer to the meaning ‘inside’ texts, yet a native speaker of Dutch would immediately replace the verb with *staan* ‘stand’ to render the sentence more idiomatic. The reason for this is that in newspaper articles, and generally all other types of non-fictional prose, meanings should be directly derivable from the very words themselves since these texts are not supposed to have hidden meanings. In Dutch postural logic, their meaning thus ‘stands’ on the paper, black on white. It is obviously not impossible for these texts to have a ‘deeper layer of meaning’ (implications, humour, sensitivity, etc.), yet such is typically not associated with them. Rather, these are the things one finds in fictional prose, poems or song lyrics. Notice, however, that if the meaning is sufficiently evident from the words or text itself, *staan* ‘stand’ remains a preferred coding even in these types of texts.

Turning then to overextensions in the context of geotopographical
location, consider the following examples from our corpus.

(30) a. de landen die vlak bij de zee *staan ...
the countries that stand close to the sea

b. terwijl Gosselies ... verder van Charleroi *staat
while Gosselies stands further away from Charleroi⁷

c. Daar *staat een beautycenter met sauna, bubbelbad en massages.
there stands a beauty centre with sauna, jacuzzi and massages
d. De universiteit **staat** in Luik en ik houd veel van deze stad
the university stands in Liège and I love this city very much

For 30a and 30b there is absolutely no discussion: the location of
land areas and cities must be coded with *liggen*. For 30c and 30d, the
situation is more complex, since the two buildings could be conceived of
as 'standing' (a vertical entity resting on its base). However, in the context
at hand, which is about the location of these buildings in a larger area (the
city), such a focus on the building itself is rather infelicitous.

There is one particular case where a learner seems to overextend the
geotopographical context.

(31) Voor een steeds betere dienstverlening zal de geldverdeler buiten het kantoor **\*liggen** to provide an increasingly better service the cash dispenser will lie outside the bank office

Usually, cash dispensers are built into the wall and do not occupy a land
surface of their own, which makes the use of *liggen* 'lie' very marked; rather
a coding with a more general location verb such as *zich bevinden* 'be located'
is preferred. One could say that the use of *liggen* 'lie' here creates a 'Google
Maps'-effect which is inappropriate for entities like a cash dispenser.

In sum, what the above L2-examples reveal is that the learners are
aware of the common extensions of posture verbs (*staan* 'stand' to refer
to printed text, *zitten* 'sit' to refer to (close) containment, and *liggen* 'lie'
to refer to geotopographical location). At the same time, the learners may
not have fully mastered some of the collocational subtleties of the target
language which leads to occasional unidiomatic uses.

## 5.4 Posture verbs in other languages

The above discussion has been limited to the extensive use of
posture verbs in Dutch. Strikingly, Dutch is not isolated in having
extended the uses of these verbs to locational uses (pertaining to the
location of inanimate entities) or metaphorical uses. In the last section
of this lecture, we will briefly refer to some other languages that show
comparable patterns of use.⁸

As already illustrated (see examples 4 to 8 above), other Germanic
languages use posture verbs in comparable uses, even if they often have
not gone as far as Dutch. Also English still uses posture verbs to refer to
the location of entities, e.g. *The horse is standing under a tree* or *The table stands
next to the window* (examples taken from Newman 2002b: 8). One striking
difference between English and Dutch is the use of *sit* as in *The plane is
sitting on the run-way*. In Dutch, *staan* 'stand' would have to be used here, as
the plane is in functional position resting on its base. Newman has called
this use 'non-activity *sit*' which is used 'to refer to a stationary position of
the entity, but with a nuance suggesting that the entity is underutilized,
out of use, useless, etc.' (2002b: 19). There is absolutely no such nuance
associated with Dutch *staan* 'stand'. Also, while English *stand* can be used
to refer to the location of objects, e.g. *A Chinese statue stands on the piano*,
Newman observes that this often sounds 'rather stilted, more literary
than colloquial, a little pretentious almost' (Newman, 2002b: 9); in
general, English prefers a coding with the verb *be*. (On why this is so, see
Lecture 8.) Also metaphorical uses of posture verbs, notably with *stand*
and *lie* are quite common in English, e.g.

(32) **stand** by your man (vs. support your man)
**stand** firm (vs. hold firm vs. be firm)
united we **stand** (vs. united we are strong)
he **stands** six-foot nine
it **stands** to reason (vs. it confirms with reason)

(33) the causes **lie** in the past
the responsibility **lies** with you

As Gibbs (2002) has shown, the notions of CONTROL, BALANCE, and SUPPORT underlie these metaphorical uses of *stand* (just as with Dutch
staan) in particular when compared to non-postural formulations as those given in brackets in the examples above. The metaphorical uses of English lie are again very similar to what one finds in Dutch. In fact, as we will detail in Lecture 8, English has lost the locational uses of posture verbs, but continues many of the metaphorical uses.

English and Dutch are both members of the same language family and thus it is to be expected that they are similar at least to some degree. Even within the larger Indo-European family, one may find striking similarities, as shown by the use of posture verbs in Slavic languages (see, for example, Rakhilina and Lemmens 2003, or Kopecka 2004). It may therefore be interesting to briefly consider some other, unrelated languages.

One of these is the language Gurenɛ, a West-African language (Niger-Congo language family). As shown in Atintono 2012, Gurenɛ also makes extensive use of posture verbs. The posture verbs gã ‘be lying’, zī ‘be sitting’, and ze’ ‘be standing’ can all be used to refer to human postures; however, locational uses (referring to the location of objects) are only possible with gã ‘be lying’ and ze’ ‘be standing’, not with zī ‘be sitting’. Here are some examples (taken from Atintono 2012).

(34) a. Bia la gã la suŋɔ la puan
child DEF lie.STAT FOC mat DEF inside
‘The child is lying in (on) the mat.’

b. Wanɛ la ze' la tiŋa
calabash DEF stand.STAT FOC land
‘The calabash is standing on the ground.’

c. Bɔɔla la gã la tiŋa.
ball.PL DEF lie-STAT FOC land
‘The balls are lying on the ground.’

Strikingly, the b- and c-sentences are quite similar to what one finds with Dutch staan ‘stand’ (object on its base) and liggen ‘lie’ (round object). However, there are some particular constraints. The first one, which has already been mentioned, is that the verb ‘sit’ cannot be used for locational
events; it can only be used in reference to human beings in a sitting
posture. Another constraint is that posture verbs cannot be used when the
human being is on an elevated ground, such as a man standing on a roof
or a child sitting on a bed. If one is 'lying' on an elevated ground, then the
verb *pagi* 'be on top, of flat or flexible objects' is to be used; if one is 'sitting/
standing' on an elevated ground, then the verb *yagi* 'be on top, with base or
stable support' is to be used. A third issue that deserves to be mentioned
is that the postural uses of the verb *zī* 'be sitting' are much more limited
than Dutch *zitten* (see Figure 8 above); for many of these different postures,
a specific verb is to be used: *dōbi* 'be in a squatting posture', *yigi* 'be in a
stooping posture', *kpa* 'kneel', *nyigi* 'kneel stooping (on hands and knees)'.
Finally, there are also cultural differences that are associated with postures.
In the Gurenɛ culture, the sitting position (expressed by the verb *zī* 'be
sitting') is the position of respect or deference for authority; this is quite
different from Western culture where standing up is often a sign of respect;
for example, in court you rise when the judge comes in or you rise when
you sing the national anthem. As a result, the verbs referring to standing or
sitting posture may have different connotations (see also Lecture 7 on this).

A final comment is that while Dutch has maximized the use of
the three cardinal posture verbs to basic locative verbs, Gurenɛ has
a fairly extensive list of such basic locative verbs, which are lexically
differentiated depending on either the type of Figure (the located object)
or the Ground (where the entity is located). By way of example, consider
the list of different INSERTION verbs:

(35) *firi* 'be stuck in, e.g. of thin objects'
*fugi* 'be stuck in, not firm, of thick objects'
*figi* 'be stuck in, of small pointed objects'
*segi* 'be stuck in between, with force e.g. of objects'
*lī* 'be inserted, tight fit'
*vure* 'be pierced, of soft entity'
*lu* 'be pierced, of tough entity'
As our short description has shown, Gurenɛ is in some ways similar to Dutch, but is also more constrained in some of its uses and has a more elaborate list of basic locative verbs where the characteristics of the Figure (located entity) and those of the Ground (where the entity is located) play a role. The role of the Ground is fairly limited in Dutch, except perhaps when it comes to functionality; recall the example of the laptop on the desk (functional ‘stand’) vs. the laptop on the bed (non-functional ‘lie’). We will come back to Gurenɛ in the next lecture which discusses placement verbs.

A last example of a language where posture verbs play an important role is Esa Ejja, an Amazonian language spoken in Bolivia (see Vuillermet 2012, Ch. 14). This language has four basic posture verbs: *ani* ‘be sitting’, *jaa* ‘be lying’ and *neki* ‘be standing’, and *ba’e* ‘be floating’ (whether in the air or the water, i.e. no contact with the ground.). In some ways, Esa Ejja is quite similar to Dutch. For example, it uses the ‘sit’ verb to refer to the location of small animals (frogs, turtles, etc.). In yet other ways, it is similar to English, as it uses ‘sit’ to refer for example to bananas that have been harvested and are located on the field, a usage comparable to non-activity *sit* in English. When the bananas are still in the tree, the verb *ba’e* ‘be floating’ is to be used, since there is no contact with the Ground. This verb is also used to refer to a baby in her mother’s arms.

Interestingly, the language has further grammaticalized the use of posture verbs in two ways. First, they can imply gender differences: when talking about the location of women, one uses *ani* ‘be.sitting’; *neki* ‘be. standing’ is used to refer to the location of males, and *ba’e* ‘be.floating’ is the more general term, allowing for the inclusion of both genders. Secondly, the verb *ani* ‘be.sitting’ has also grammaticalized to a suffix marking the present tense.

## 5.5 Concluding remarks

In different unrelated languages across the world, the use of posture verbs extends from postural uses to basic locative uses that refer to the
location of inanimate entities. Invariably, these extensions are motivated
by image schemata, abstract representations of repeated bodily and spatial
experiences. Sitting, lying and standing are basic human experiences
and we often project our body image and experience on other objects.
In addition, posture verbs often show ample metaphorical and/or
idiomatic uses which apply these image schematic representations to
abstract entities. And finally, in some languages posture verbs have
grammaticalized to markers of tense, aspect, or mood.

Our detailed description of Dutch posture verbs has revealed how
their uses can be explained via extensions from a prototype drawing
on image schemata and other associations with these cardinal postures.
While many uses of their extensive semantic networks have not been
discussed here, the above summary has revealed the basic semantic
mechanisms that underlie their most important uses. Considering their
locational uses, and particularly the variations that may exist (such as a
building said to ‘lie’ or ‘stand’, or salt on the table as ‘lying’ or ‘standing’,
or butter ‘lying’, ‘sitting’, or ‘standing’ in the fridge), we could say that
the Dutch posture verbs actually function in ways that are similar to
what noun classifiers do in other languages. These classifiers often
specify characteristics of the entity that the noun refers to, i.e. whether
it is liquid, oblong-shaped, pointed, rigid, sand-like, sticky, tubular,
etc. Clearly, the Dutch categories are less refined than in many of these
languages, yet the parallel with how the Dutch posture verbs indeed
categorize the located entities cannot be denied.

We will come back to some of the semantic patterns of posture verbs
in the next chapter, which discusses transitive placement verbs that often
are aligned with the intransitive posture verbs.

Notes

1 My work on Dutch posture verbs has been greatly inspired by Fagan (1991), Gibbs et al. (1994), Serra Borneto (1996), Van den Toorn (1972), Van Oosten (1984), and Van den Hoek (1971). See also Newman (2002a) and the chapters therein on posture verbs in different languages.
2 We use capital letters to indicate the cross-linguistic nature of the labels referring to these three posture verbs as realised in different languages.

3 Interview with Howard Gutman in *Knack Weekend*, June 22, 2011; my translation from Dutch.

4 Van Oosten (1984: 144) makes a similar claim of standing being the canonical position for human beings; see Lemmens and Perrez (2010) for a justification.

5 This is similar to what one finds in Italian with the verb *stare* 'stand', e.g. *Stava per perdere il treno* (stand.3SG PREP lose.INF the train 'He was about to miss the train') (Devoto and Oli 1971: 2347; as cited in Newman and Rice 2004: 352).

6 For ease of identification, the unidiomatic uses of the verb in the cited learner examples have been marked with an asterisk (*); other mistakes that may occur in the sentences have not been corrected nor have they been marked.

7 Gosselies and Charleroi are two cities in the French speaking part of Belgium.

8 For some general typological discussion of (grammaticalized) uses of posture verbs, see for example Newman 2002a and the articles therein or Ameka and Levinson 2007.
# A cognitive lexical semantic analysis of placement verbs

## 6.1 Posture and placement verbs

This lecture can be regarded as the causative counterpart of the previous one. In Lecture 5, we discussed the extensive use of posture verbs in Dutch that have developed into basic locative verbs. In the present lecture, we take this discussion further by looking at placement verbs. A placement verb, like English *put* or *place*, expresses a causative event of putting an entity somewhere, usually in a certain posture or a certain location. Many languages have developed a system where the posture verbs and the placement verbs are actually aligned; placement verbs could thus be considered as 'causative posture verbs'.

Once again, I can use the Germanic language family to illustrate such an alignment. As shown in Table 12, in these languages, there is a systematic vowel alternation between the causative and non-causative posture verbs; this system goes back to Proto-Germanic (500 to 250 B.C.) where the verb's stem vowel changed under the influence of the causative suffix *-jan* that was added to the posture verb (this kind of vowel change is also known as i-mutation).¹
<table><caption>Table 12. Causative and non-causative posture verb alternation in Germanic languages</caption><thead><tr><th colspan="2">SWEDISH</th><th colspan="2">GERMAN</th><th colspan="2">DUTCH</th><th colspan="2">ENGLISH</th></tr><tr><th>non-causative</th><th>causative</th><th>non-causative</th><th>causative</th><th>non-causative</th><th>causative</th><th>non-causative</th><th>causative</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>sitta</td><td>sätta</td><td>sitzen</td><td>setzen</td><td>zitten</td><td>zetten</td><td>sit</td><td>(set)/put</td></tr><tr><td>stå</td><td>ställa</td><td>stehen</td><td>stellen</td><td>staan</td><td>(stellen)</td><td>stand</td><td>put</td></tr><tr><td>ligga</td><td>lägga</td><td>liegen</td><td>legen</td><td>liggen</td><td>leggen</td><td>lie</td><td>(lay)/put</td></tr></tbody></table>

In other words, the causative (transitive) verbs have been derived from the non-causative (intransitive) posture verbs. For example, the English verb *lay* goes back to a morphologically complex form which can be paraphrased as *lie* + CAUS.²

This morphological derivation is no longer transparent to contemporary speakers of these languages; nevertheless, these pairs are recognized as establishing a systematic correspondence (a paradigm) relating posture and placement verbs. Swedish and German are two languages which have best preserved the alignment: *sätta/setzen* means ‘to cause to sit (*sitta/sitzen*)’; *ställa/stellen*, ‘to cause to stand (*stå/stehen*)’; and *lägga/legen*, ‘to cause to lie (*ligga/liegen*)’. English is the language where this paradigm has been disturbed most; the Old English verb *stellan* (‘to make stand’) has been lost completely and while the two other placement verbs (*set* and *lay*) still exist, they are not used all that often; mostly the (general) verb *put* is used.³

## 6.2 Aspect-causative lexicalization patterns

In the original Germanic system as described above, the posture verbs used to be the basic verb from which the causative was derived (via the addition of a suffix). In this context, Talmy observes that ‘languages form a typology according to their characteristic way of expressing (change of) state.’ (2000, II: 67). Cross-linguistically, Talmy says, for the semantic domain of states, there seem to exist three main aspect-
causative types of lexicalization patterns (combination of verb roots and other grammatical elements): (i) Stative (‘being in a state’), (ii) Inchoative (‘entering into a state’), and (iii) Agentive (‘putting into a state’) (Talmy 2000,II: 78). Languages actually have a preference for which one of these three they lexicalize in their verb roots. In other words, one of these three patterns gives the basic verb from which the other two are derived. Let us illustrate this with examples from English, Dutch, and French, given in Table 13.

In English, the intransitive posture verb (*stand, lie, sit*) is the basic form. The inchoative form (expressing getting into a state) is derived from this form by adding a particle (*stand up, lie down, sit down*). The agentive form (put into a state), in turn, is derived from the inchoative by turning the verb + particle into a transitive verb construction (*stand someone up, lay someone down, sit someone up*). Also for Dutch, the intransitive posture verb is basic (in Table 13 *liggen* ‘lie’ is used as an example but any of the three verbs would have worked); the inchoative is derived from the stative by adding the (inchoative) auxiliary verb *gaan* ‘go’ (*gaan liggen* means ‘lie down’). Also the causative is derived from the intransitive, at least historically.⁴ Strikingly, the French derivation goes in the opposite direction: the basic verb is the agentive verb *asseoir* ‘put someone in a sitting position’; the inchoative is derived from this agentive verb by adding a reflexive pronoun (*s’asseoir* lit. ‘sit yourself’); also the stative is derived from the agentive via a resultative construction where the auxiliary *être* (‘be’) combines with a past participle. In other words, in French, the state of sitting is expressed as the result of an action: *être assis* literally means ‘be seated’. In sum, in the Germanic languages, the intransitive stative is the basic form, in the Romance languages, the agentive verb is the basic form. Talmy mentions that other languages, like Japanese, take the inchoative form as the basic form. In English paraphrase, this means that in Japanese ‘I arise’ (inchoative) is basic; the stative is derived from this (‘I have arisen’) and so is the agentive form (‘CAUSE to arise’).
<table><caption>Table 13. Aspect-causative lexicalization patterns (adapted from Talmy 2000, II: 80)</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>STATIVE<br>'be in a state'</th><th colspan="2">INCHOATIVE<br>'get into a state'</th><th>AGENTIVE<br>'put into a state'</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>English</th><td>v<br>stand<br>lie</td><td>→</td><td>V + PRT<br>stand up<br>lie down</td><td>→ V + CAUS + PRT<br>stand s.o. up<br>lay s.o. down</td></tr><tr><th>Dutch</th><td>v<br>liggen<br>'lie'</td><td>→</td><td>AUX + V<br>gaan liggen<br>'go lie'</td><td>→ V + CAUS<br>leggen<br>'lay'</td></tr><tr><th>French</th><td>AUX + PAST PART.<br>être assis<br>'be sit.PAPA'</td><td>←</td><td>V + REFL<br>s'asseoir<br>'REFL sit.TR'</td><td>V<br>asseoir<br>'sit.TR'</td></tr></tbody></table>

Talmy's observations are quite insightful but need to be nuanced in two ways. First of all, Gurenɛ, the West-African language already introduced in the previous lecture, does not fit the Talmian typology presented in Table 13 (see Atintono 2012, Atintono and Lemmens 2013). Secondly, the neat derivational system has been disturbed in the Germanic languages (as already hinted at above). Let us briefly take up these two elements in turn.

As will be recalled from the previous lecture, the West African language Gurenɛ has three basic posture verbs, gã ‘be lying’, zĩ ‘be sitting’, and ze’ ‘be standing’, but also has a longer list of basic locative verbs lexically differentiated by the type of Figure or by the type of Ground. Table 14 lists a (non-exhaustive) selection of such locative verbs and their static and dynamic form; the latter is derived from the static by adding the morpheme -le. Some verbs use the morpheme -m for the dynamic form (see Table 15). The cardinal posture verbs are an exception to this morphological regularity, as their stative form does not have the -i morpheme, as shown in Table 16.⁵ There are also some other exceptions: some verbs, shown in Table 17, do not have any morphological marking, either in the stative or the dynamic forms.
<table><caption>Table 14. Static vs. dynamic location verbs in Gurenɛ (-lɛ/e) (selection)</caption><thead><tr><th>STATIC verb root + -i</th><th>DYNAMIC (inch. + agent.)<br>stative root + -lɛ/e</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>dɔb-i 'be in a squatting posture'</td><td>dɔbə-lɛ 'squat (down)'</td></tr><tr><td>yig-i 'be in a stooping posture'</td><td>yigə-le 'stoop'</td></tr><tr><td>yag-i 'be on top, with stable support'</td><td>yagə-le 'put on top, stable'</td></tr><tr><td>pag-i 'be on top, of flexible or flat objects'</td><td>pagə- lɛ 'put on top, flat'</td></tr><tr><td>dɔg-i 'be on top, with unstable support'</td><td>dɔgə-le 'put on top, unstable'</td></tr><tr><td>tab-i 'be stuck, of mastic substance'</td><td>tabə-le 'stick, of mastic substance'</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>Table 15. Static vs. dynamic posture verbs in Gurenɛ (-m)</caption><thead><tr><th>STATIC verb root + -i</th><th>DYNAMIC (inch. + agent.)<br>stative root + -m</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>del-i 'be leaning-sitting posture'</td><td>delu-m 'lean-sit'</td></tr><tr><td>lal-i 'be leaning- standing posture'</td><td>lalu-m 'lean-stand'</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>Table 16. Static vs. dynamic posture verbs in Gurenɛ</caption><thead><tr><th>STATIC verb root + -Ø</th><th>DYNAMIC (inch. + agent.)<br>stative root + -lɛ/e</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>gā 'be in a lying posture'</td><td>gā'a-rɛ 'lie (down)</td></tr><tr><td>zī 'be in a sitting posture'</td><td>zī'i-re 'sit (down)'</td></tr><tr><td>ze' 'be in a standing posture'</td><td>ze'e-le 'stand (up)'</td></tr><tr><td>tī 'be leaning, of objects'</td><td>tī'i-le 'lean, of objects'</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>Table 17. Static vs. dynamic location verbs in Gurenɛ without morphological marking</caption><thead><tr><th>STATIC verb root + -Ø</th><th>DYNAMIC (inch. + agent.)<br>verb root + -Ø</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>kpa 'be in kneeling position'</td><td>kpa 'kneel'</td></tr><tr><td>vure 'be pierced, of soft entity'</td><td>vure 'pierce, of soft entity'</td></tr><tr><td>lu' 'be pierced, of tough entity'</td><td>lu' 'pierce, of tough entity'</td></tr><tr><td>vile 'be tied, not firm'</td><td>vile 'tie, not firm'</td></tr><tr><td>pī 'be covered, fully'</td><td>pī 'cover, fully'</td></tr></tbody></table>
In view of the Talmian schema of aspect-causative types discussed above, there are two important nuances to be added. First of all, the forms in Table 17 do not show any derivational direction, so in these cases it is not possible to say which form is basic and which one is derived. A second important nuance, which holds for all the verbs, is that the dynamic form comprises both the inchoative ('get into a state') and the agentive ('put into a state'). In other words, Gurenɛ does not distinguish the two via lexical or morphological patterns, but via the larger syntactic construction (intransitive vs. transitive), as shown in the following examples, where the a-sentence each time expresses the inchoative (intransitive construction) and the b-sentence, the agentive.

(1) a. Bia la zǐi-re la suŋɔ la zuo
child DEF sit-DYN DEF mat DEF head
'The child sat down on the mat.' (inchoative)

b. Ba zǐi-re bia la kuka la zuo
3PL sit-DYN child DEF chair DEF head
'They sat the child down on the chair.' (agentive.)

(2) a. Posɔɔ la ze'e-le la tiŋa
maid DEF stand-DYN FOC ground
'The maid servant stood on the ground.' (inchoative)

b. Posɔɔ la ze'e-le la bia la tiŋa
maid DEF stand-DYN FOC child DEF ground
'The maidservant stood the child on the ground.' (agentive.)

(3) a. Pipa la pagɔ-lɛ la kuka la zuo
paper DEF put.on.top flat-DYN FOC chair DEF head
'The paper got on top (flat) of the chair.' (inchoative)

b. A pagɔ-lɛ pipa la kuka la zuo
3SG put.on.top flat-DYN paper DEF chair DEF head
'S/he has put the paper flat on top of the table.' (agentive.)

In fact, in this respect Gurenɛ is not unlike what one has in English.
Talmy suggest that the English agentive *stand someone up* is derived from
the inchoative *stand up*, but one may question this derivational direction: given the absence of morphological marking (in which case a derivational logic can be defended), do speakers of English still consider one as basic and the other as derived? Perhaps it is more accurate to say that both the inchoative *stand up* and the agentive *stand someone up* are simultaneously present in the linguistic system? Talmy's concern is with lexicalization patterns, i.e. which semantic (or conceptual) components of an event (such as motion, cause, manner, etc.) have received a lexical expression. For example, the verb *stand* lexicalizes location and posture (or by extension, orientation), the verb *dance* lexicalizes motion and manner, the verb *frame* lexicalizes the cause and Ground of the motion event ('put in a frame'), the verb *snow* lexicalizes motion and Figure ('snow is moving').⁶ From this perspective, it makes sense to say that *stand*, which prototypically is intransitive, is basic (it lexicalizes location and posture) and the transitive is derived, as another element (*viz.* cause) is added to the semantic structure when it occurs in a transitive construction. From a construction grammar perspective, the latter could be seen as an instance of coercion, the idea that the meaning of a lexical item is adjusted to that of the morphosyntactic construction in which it appears. In Construction Grammar, both verbs and constructions are considered as form-meaning pairings, emerging from usage (see Lecture 2). In such a framework, the data from Gurenɛ do not present any a problem, since the meaning of the verb and that of the construction interact in different ways. In this perspective, the question of derivation does not really arise. That does not deny, however, that certain constructional patterns may be more prototypical than others, as determined (among other things) by frequency of usage. The Gurenɛ data work well to illustrate this point in the context of location and placement verbs, given the (usually overt) morphological marking, but also data from contemporary English add further constructional nuances to Talmy's observations.

In English, the stative and dynamic are generally distinguished along the lines suggested by Talmy: the stative form is basic (e.g. *sit*), the
dynamic is derived by adding a directional particle *up* or *down* (e.g. *sit down*). However, as Newman (2009) points out, in English the static and the dynamic uses (inchoative and agentive) have merged bi-directionally, such that the original stative forms can be used to refer to dynamic events and the originally dynamic forms occur in reference to stative situations, as shown in the examples below. As in Gurenæ, the difference between the two dynamic situations (inchoative and agentive) is realized constructionally (intransitive versus transitive respectively).

(4) a. I sat on the chair (stative form, stative meaning)

b. Come and sit with me (stative form, dynamic meaning)

(5) I sat down for hours making phone calls (dynamic form, stative meaning)

(6) a. I lay down on the bed (dynamic form, stative or dynamic meaning)

b. I lay myself (down) on the bed (dynamic form, dynamic meaning)

(7) a. The child sat up straight (dynamic form, stative or dynamic meaning)

b. The child sat herself straight up (dynamic form, dynamic meaning)

c. Mother sat the baby up (dynamic form, dynamic meaning)

In short, the stative and dynamic forms have both become ambiguous, allowing both a stative and a dynamic interpretation, depending on the context. Newman suggests that this ambiguity explains why English no longer uses posture verbs to the same extent as the other Germanic languages do (see Lecture 8). This is in fact not the only disturbance in the English paradigm: while the verbs *sit (down)*, *lie (down)*, and *stand (up)* can still be used in postural contexts, the general placement verb *put* has taken over nearly all other uses. Even in the context of bringing someone in a particular posture, the verb *put* can used, e.g. *They put her on a chair* next to *They sat her on a chair* (see again Lecture 8 for a more detailed discussion). This makes English stand out again from the other Germanic languages, as was already indicated earlier (see Table 12 above). The next section discusses in more detail the causative posture verbs in Dutch; this
discussion presents the ‘causative’ counterpart of the discussion of posture verbs in the previous lecture.

## 6.3 Dutch placement verbs

While the paradigm of posture and placement verbs has almost completely been lost in English, it is relatively well preserved in the other Germanic languages, particularly in German and the Scandinavian languages. In Dutch, the paradigm is still strong, but there have been some important disturbances, summarized in Figure 12. In a nutshell, the changes that have occurred are the following.

(i) *stellen* ‘make stand’ has been lost as the causative of *staan* ‘stand’, except in some relics, mostly metaphorical uses, e.g. *in werking stellen* (‘set into operation’), *ter discussie stellen* (lit. ‘set to discussion’, = make s.th. subject of discussion), or *tentoonstellen* (‘put on display’);

(ii) *zetten* ‘make sit’ fills the gap left by *stellen*, a change that may appear strange at first sight since what once meant ‘make-sit’ now means ‘make-stand’;

(iii) some other verbs, originally external to the paradigm, take over one of the meanings of *zetten* ‘make-sit’ (*containment*), i.e. *steken* (lit. ‘stick (into)’, *stoppen* (lit. ‘stop, fill’), and *doen* (lit. ‘do’).

While it may be surprising at first sight that Dutch *zetten* changes from ‘make sit’ to ‘make stand’, English *set* follows the same path, both in

<figure><img src="image_22.png" /><figcaption>Figure 12. Disturbances in the Dutch paradigm</figcaption></figure>
locational and metaphorical use, as illustrated by the examples below.

(8) a. The waiter set the plates on the table

b. They set the box on the ground

(9) a. set fire to (cf. Dutch ‘the house stood on fire’)

b. set the alarm at 7:00 (cf. Dutch *staan-zetten*)

The meaning of English *set* can perhaps best be defined as ‘put in its
functional (or appropriate) position’. This is close to the meaning of *stand*
(and *staan* in Dutch), but for English, there is an additional difficulty,
since as pointed out in the previous lecture, the uses of *set* in example 8
may correspond to either *stand* (*The plates stand on the table*) or *sit* (*The plates
sit on the table*). Recall that in English, the verb *put* is often preferred (e.g.
*put the plates on the table* or *put the alarm at 7:00*) and in the stative context,
the verb *be* is often preferred (*The plates are on the table*).

My study of Dutch placement verbs is based on a sample of 7,550
sentences drawn from the largest computerized corpus of Dutch,
available at the *Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie* (INL), Leiden.⁷
The corpus contains 38 million words, and includes a variety of texts,
exclusively non-fictional, the vast majority of them or written. The
frequency distribution of the placement verbs in the INL corpus is given
in Table 18 which also presents the frequency of the major uses of these
verbs. For the latter, a distinction has been made between locational uses
(concerning the placement of concrete entities in space), metaphorical
uses (abstract entities or abstract locations), and idiomatic uses (fixed
expressions).

The verbs *steken* (lit. ‘stick’) and *stoppen* (lit. ‘stop, fill’) are remarkably
less frequent, which is to be expected, given that they are only used for one
particular meaning, that of *CAUSED CONTAINMENT*. As will be recalled from
Lecture 5, the *CONTAINMENT* reading covers only part of the uses of *zitten*
‘sit’ for which these two verbs are the causative counterpart.

If one looks at the meaning categories of the placement verbs
in the corpus, there are two observations to be made. First of all, the
<table><caption>Table 18. Distribution of placement verbs in the INL corpus</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th></th><th>leggen</th><th>zetten</th><th>steken</th><th>stoppen</th><th>TOTAL</th></tr><tr><th></th><th></th><th>'make-stand'</th><th>'make-lie'</th><th>'make-contained'</th><th></th><th></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="2">Metaphorical</td><td>N</td><td>1,047</td><td>1,251</td><td>218</td><td>100</td><td>2,648</td></tr><tr><td>%</td><td>34.0%</td><td>35.2%</td><td>35.1%</td><td>33.2%</td><td>35.1%</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">Idiomatic</td><td>N</td><td>1,273</td><td>1,468</td><td>221</td><td>23</td><td>2,953</td></tr><tr><td>%</td><td>41.4%</td><td>41.4%</td><td>35.6%</td><td>7.6%</td><td>39.1%</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">Locational</td><td>N</td><td>711</td><td>796</td><td>181</td><td>170</td><td>1,858</td></tr><tr><td>%</td><td>23.1%</td><td>22.4%</td><td>29.1%</td><td>56.5%</td><td>24.6%</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">Indeterminate</td><td>N</td><td>46</td><td>36</td><td>1</td><td>8</td><td>91</td></tr><tr><td>%</td><td>1.5%</td><td>1.0%</td><td>0.2%</td><td>2.7%</td><td>1.2%</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">TOTAL</td><td>N</td><td><strong>3,077</strong></td><td><strong>3,551</strong></td><td><strong>621</strong></td><td><strong>301</strong></td><td><strong>7,550</strong></td></tr><tr><td>%</td><td><strong>41%</strong></td><td><strong>47%</strong></td><td><strong>8%</strong></td><td><strong>4%</strong></td><td><strong>100%</strong></td></tr></tbody></table>

vast majority of uses (74%) are metaphorical or idiomatic uses which confirms the wide semantic coverage of these verbs (similar distributions have been found for posture verbs); only 25% of the uses concern location events. Secondly, when zooming in on the locative uses with a human Theme (the entity moving, see Table 19), one sees that only a minority (57 on 307 or 19%) refer to ‘caused posture’, where a human being is placed in a sitting or lying posture. This amounts to less than 1% of the total number of attestations (75 on 7,550).⁸ The explanation for this is fairly straightforward: human beings can be assumed to have full control over their bodily posture. The contexts in which a ‘caused posture’ occurs are indeed those where the human being has no such control, as is the case with babies or ill and injured people (e.g. *De vrouw zette de baby in de stoel* ‘the woman sat the baby in the chair’).

Non-postural uses with a human Theme occur with *zetten* ‘make stand’ only, referring to placing people somewhere. Such placement implies some kind of power relationship as these human beings are seen as ‘placeable’. In some contexts, this is perfectly legitimate, for example, sports coaches or choreographers who place their players or actors in a particular position. The majority of cases, however, concern
<table><caption>Table 19. Location uses with human Theme</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th></th><th>leggen</th><th>zetten</th><th>steken</th><th>stoppen</th><th>Total</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="2">Postural</td><td>N</td><td>43</td><td>14</td><td></td><td></td><td>57</td></tr><tr><td>%</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>19%</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">Locational</td><td>N</td><td></td><td>192</td><td>35</td><td>23</td><td>250</td></tr><tr><td>%</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>67%</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">Total</td><td>N</td><td>43</td><td>206</td><td>35</td><td>23</td><td>307</td></tr><tr><td>Row %</td><td>14%</td><td>67.1%</td><td>11.4%</td><td>7.5%</td><td>100%</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">% on Grand Total</td><td></td><td>1.4%</td><td>1.2%</td><td>6.9%</td><td>14.3%</td><td>4%</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>(3,077)</td><td>(3,551)</td><td>(621)</td><td>(301)</td><td>(7,550)</td></tr></tbody></table>

people whose location, rather than posture, we typically conceive of as controllable. These ‘transplantable’ people are generally considered to be dispensable with: apart from putting them in prison, we put them on trains, boats or airplanes or out of the country (fugitives), on the street, or out of the house, as shown in Table 20.

<table><caption>Table 20. Contexts for human Theme with zetten ‘make-stand’</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>zetten 'make stand'</th><th></th><th>TOTAL</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="4">expel from country:</td><td>out of the country</td><td>31</td><td>19%</td></tr><tr><td>put on plane, train, boat, bus</td><td>61</td><td>37%</td></tr><tr><td>out of the city</td><td>1</td><td>1%</td></tr><tr><td>place somewhere isolated</td><td>2</td><td>1%</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="4">expel from house:</td><td>put on the street</td><td>18</td><td>11%</td></tr><tr><td>put out of a room</td><td>5</td><td>3%</td></tr><tr><td>out of one's house</td><td>8</td><td>5%</td></tr><tr><td>put player in position in game</td><td>3</td><td>1%</td></tr><tr><td>put in sitting position (on chair, etc.)</td><td>9</td><td>5%</td></tr><tr><td>miscellaneous</td><td></td><td>28</td><td>17%</td></tr><tr><td><strong>TOTAL</strong></td><td></td><td><strong>166</strong></td><td><strong>100%</strong></td></tr></tbody></table>

In the introduction of this lecture, we presented the symmetrical alignment of the posture verbs and the placement verbs (Table 12), where
it was specified that the placement verbs are the causative counterpart of the posture verbs ('make-sit', 'make-lie' and 'make-stand'). While this is true in general, the question is whether this correspondence is as harmonious as Table 12 suggests. In other words, do the uses of the placement verbs correspond to those of the posture verbs described in the previous lecture? We cannot present a detailed description here, but only mention the major patterns of use which we will present in English paraphrase only (see Lemmens 2006b for some corpus examples).

Staan <=> zetten

One of the basic extensions of *staan* 'stand' relates to objects in functional position resting on their base, a usage building on the image of standing humans in functional position on their feet. Logically, the causative counterpart *zetten* 'make stand' is often used to refer to putting a human being on their feet or putting an entity on its base, e.g. (using English paraphrases of the Dutch uses) 'set yourself over there' (= go and stand), 'set the plates on the table', 'set the car in front of the house', 'set the bottle on the table'.

Recall that if an entity is not on its base or if it does not have a base (such as a book), *staan* 'stand' can be used if its actual orientational dimension is more vertical than horizontal. Similarly, *zetten* 'make-stand' will be used if you place an object in such a way, e.g. 'set the dishes in the dishwasher' (base is cancelled out, saliently vertical orientation), 'set the bottle upside-down', 'set the book on the table' (English paraphrases again).

The verb *staan* 'stand' can be used in contexts where there is a mental scanning away from the origin, like branches 'standing' on a tree. Also this use finds a causative equivalent in *zetten* 'make stand', e.g. 'set the handle back onto the cup' or 'set the arm back onto the doll'. Note that these are usages where a reading of 'make sit' could also work, since one establishes firm contact between the two entities.

One particular case that was said to be quite productive is the use of
staan 'stand' to refer to printed text. This finds its causative counterpart in zetten 'make stand' as well; in other words, in Dutch, you say 'set the words on paper', 'set the file on the internet', or 'set a full stop after a sentence'.

Finally, FUNCTIONALITY turns out to be an important factor for zetten 'make stand' as well. For example, placing a knife in/on a cake (to cut it) will be expressed by zetten (*Hij zet het mes in de taart*. 'He puts the knife in the cake'). This does not find an equivalent in the posture verb staan 'stand', for the simple reason that this is not a position that the knife could maintain on its own accord. In this context, zetten means 'put in a functional position'.

Liggen <=> leggen

If an entity is not on its base (feet for human beings), its location is often expressed with liggen 'lie' (unless it is saliently vertical, cf. above). One of the basic meanings of causative leggen 'lay' is thus 'to NOT put an entity on its base', e.g. 'lay yourself on the bed' (= not on your feet), 'lay the plates upside down on the table', 'lay the car on its side' (unusual action), 'lay the bottle on the table' (horizontal), or 'lay the book on the shelf' (flat).

Non-rigid entities (like clothes or substances) assume a horizontal extension under the force of gravity and their location is thus typically expressed with liggen 'lie'; their placement is thus also typically expressed with leggen 'make lie', e.g. 'lay the clothes on the bed', 'lay the sand on the floor', or 'lay the rope on the desk'. However, there are some contexts in which this parallel breaks down, viz. with liquid entities. For example, water on the table will be said to 'lie' but putting water on the table will not be expressed with leggen 'make lie', you would rather use a verb like gieten 'pour'. The reason is most likely that liquids are too uncontrollable to be placed somewhere. Note that even in English *put water on the table* sounds unidiomatic in reference to the substance (not when *water* metonymically stands for 'water in a bottle') and the verb *pour* is preferred
here as well.

It will be remembered from the description of *liggen* ‘lie’ in the previous lecture, that the verb is used to express the location of round and symmetrical objects (dimensionless objects not having a base). In this context the causative equivalence holds as well, e.g. ‘lay the ball on the grass’ or ‘lay the dice on the table’.

Finally, one common use of *liggen* ‘lie’ concerns abstract entities. As was explained in Lecture 5, some of these have a particular image associated with them (points conceptualized as a round object, frontiers conceptualized as lines or ribbons), but this was not always the case (e.g. responsibility, guilt, etc.). As can be expected, placing these abstract entities somewhere (a usage which is clearly metaphorical) can often be coded with *leggen* ‘make lie’, e.g. ‘lay the responsibility with the others’, ‘lay the power with the government’, or ‘lay the initiative with the students’. Since we are dealing with events concerning the manipulation of abstract entities, alternative metaphors are often possible (e.g. one ‘draws’ a frontier). The parallels are thus less strong in these cases.

Zitten <=> zetten / steken / stoppen / doen ('set / stick / tug into / do')

While *zetten* ‘make stand’ and *leggen* ‘make lie’ are still fairly straightforward as causative counterparts of *staan* ‘stand’ and *liggen* ‘lie’ respectively, the story is quite more complicated with the causative counterparts of *zitten* ‘sit’. The reason for this is that the semantic structure of *zitten* ‘sit’ is more varied, in particular concerning the (CLOSE) CONTAINMENT and (close) CONTACT readings.

As already explained above, a first complication is that the original causative counterpart of *zitten* ‘sit’ was *zetten*, but this verb changed to mean ‘make stand’ (as did English *set*). However, even if restricted, *zetten* can sometimes still be used to mean ‘put in a sitting position’ in particular in the context of people who are not in control of their posture as mentioned above. Another context in which the verb is still possible,
at least in Belgian Dutch, it the reflexive use *zich zetten* ‘REFL make sit’ (compare with English *sit yourself down*). In standard Dutch, this is not really accepted, and a different construction is needed, with the auxiliary *gaan* ‘go’ (see Table 13 above).

One meaning of *zitten* ‘sit’ that is quite common is the one referring to (CLOSE) CONTAINMENT. Since *zetten* can no longer be used as the causative equivalent of *zitten*, other verbs have come into the causative paradigm to express caused containment. What makes matters complicated is that there is not one but three verbs that can express this meaning, i.e. *steken* (‘stick’), *stoppen* (lit. ‘stop’ but here ‘tug into’), and *doen* (‘do’). The verb *doen* ‘do’ is typically used for substances that are either put into a container or are mixed with other substances (also seen as a containment relationship). So, typically, one says ‘*do* the coffee in a tin’ or ‘*do* some sugar in your coffee’. However, the verb is expanding to other contexts of (close) containment as well, such as putting a letter in an envelope or a CD in a CD-box. In other words, *doen* ‘do’ begins to function as English *put* at least in the context of containment.

Even though there is some degree of overlap, *steken* and *stoppen* when used for caused containment have different prototypes related to their different etymological origins. The origin of *steken* is ‘to insert a sharp pointed object into something’ (related to English *stick*); *stoppen* has as its original meaning ‘insert a stopper/plug into an opening’ (generally to halt movement, comparable to English *stop*). The differences between the two verbs as it appears from our corpus data (about 200 locative uses for each) can be summarized as in Table 21.

First, the two verbs take different types of Themes: *steken* shows a preference for elongated objects, like sticks, knifes, extending body parts, etc. (68% vs. only 11% for *stoppen*). Conversely, the types of Themes occurring with *stoppen* are less focused on one particular type and mostly the shape specifications do no really matter. Nevertheless, there is higher number of mass types (20%) and symmetrical types (7%) than with *steken* (2.4% and 0% respectively).
<table><caption>Table 21. Prototype clusters for *steken* and *stoppen*</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>steken</th><th>stoppen</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>(i) Figure</td><td>stick-shape, elongated</td><td>round, symmetrical, mass or 'shapeless'.</td></tr><tr><td>(ii) Containment</td><td>partial or weak (large container)</td><td>full</td></tr><tr><td>(iii) Ground</td><td>forced open by action</td><td>container or object with hole in it</td></tr></tbody></table>

<figure><img src="image_23.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_24.png" /></figure>

Secondly, *steken* typically refers to partial containment and *stoppen*, to full containment, a difference that logically follows from the different Themes. Consequently, alternative encodings such as *een stokje in de grond* {stoppen/steken} ('stick/stop a little stick into the ground') are semantically non-identical: *steken* means that the stick will be brought into the ground (more or less vertically) and only partially so, whereas with *stoppen* its orientation will be more horizontal and the object will be fully buried in the ground.

Thirdly, the verbs typically differ in the type of Ground they take, once again in accordance with the different type of containment they encode. *Stoppen* typically occurs with ‘pre-existing’ containers as Ground, e.g. bag, box, pocket, trunk, mouth, throat, etc. (85% vs. only 20% for *steken*). With *steken*, the containment relationship is typically created by the (forceful) insertion of the Theme into the Ground that previous to the action did not exist as a container as such.

A final comment that should be made here is that on top of these different semantic tendencies, the verbs *steken* and *stoppen* are further characterized by a regional difference: in the Belgian variant, *steken* has become much more general and applicable to situations where one has full containment and non-elongated Figures, uses to which speakers of the Northern Dutch (spoken in the Netherlands) variant strongly object.
<figure><img src="image_25.png" /><figcaption>Figure 13. Simplified representation of posture and placement verb correspondences</figcaption></figure>

Conversely, speakers of Belgian Dutch often feel *stoppen* to be typically Netherlandic.

The correspondences between the posture and placement verbs that have been discussed here can perhaps best be summarized as in Figure
13. The figure only represents postural and locational uses and does not include metaphorical uses.

## 6.4 Concluding remarks

In this lecture we have discussed the relationship between posture verbs and their causative equivalents, with a special focus on Dutch where the two types of verbs play an important role. The patterns that one finds in Dutch can, however, be related to a larger typological perspective on how languages express being in a location (stative), getting into a location (inchoative), or putting into a location (agentive). As Talmy (2000) has shown, languages tend to have a preference for which of these three they lexicalize in the verbal roots. For example, the Germanic languages were shown to lexicalize the stative in their verb roots (posture and locative verbs) and derive the inchoative and agentive from these. The Romance languages go in the opposite direction: their verbal roots are agentive and the inchoative and stative are derived from these. While the Talmian classification is generally correct, we have added some nuances, drawing on data from Gurenɛ but also from English and Dutch.

As further illustrated in this lecture, Dutch uses placement verbs extensively, mostly in perfect alignment of the use of posture verbs as described in Lecture 5. However, there have been some historical disturbances in the originally neat paradigmatic alignment of posture and placement verbs. In particular, the expression of ‘caused containment’ turns out to be more varied, even if our corpus data allowed us to establish some clear tendencies.

English is the only Germanic language that does not use the different placement verbs all that much anymore and if it does, these are often metaphorical uses. The demise of the placement verbs in English lines up with that of the posture verbs. What explains this disappearance will be taken up in Lecture 8. However, before turning to this historical
perspective, we will wrap up the discussion of posture verbs by considering some further grammaticalizations that these verbs have undergone, in Dutch as well as in other languages.

## Notes

1. There are some other relics of such i-mutated pairs going back to the causative suffix -jan, e.g. fall (intr.) — fell (trans. 'make fall' <fall+jan), drink (intr.) — drench (trans., lit. 'make drink' <drink+jan).

2. More accurately, the Proto-Germanic source of English lie is *legian; that of lay is *lagojanan. There are no written records of Proto-Germanic; this has been reconstructed (as indicated by the *) by specialists of historical linguistics.

3. For this reason, we will in the following systematically translate the three placement verbs in Dutch as ‘make sit’, ‘make lie’, and ‘make stand’.

4. As said above, the original Proto-Germanic derivation pattern (with the causative suffix that was added to the intransitive posture verb) is no longer transparent to contemporary speakers of Dutch. The arrow in the table should thus actually be bi-directional.

5. The absence of the -i morpheme may have a phonological reason, as the posture verbs all end in a vowel.

6. We will come back to Talmy’s idea of lexicalization patterns in Lecture 9.

7. Use of the INL corpora is herewith gratefully acknowledged. They can be accessed at http://www.inl.nl.

8. It can be added here that also for the posture verbs zitten 'sit', liggen 'lie', and staan 'stand', the uses referring to actual posture are also limited, ranging from 10% to 15%; this confirms the extensive semantic coverage of these verbs.
## Lecture 7

# Grammaticalization of (Dutch) posture verbs to grammatical markers

## 7.1 From spatial to progressive

This lecture continues the discussion of posture verbs; more particularly, it considers the evolution of these verbs to grammatical markers. As with the preceding lectures, we will mostly focus on Dutch, by way of example. It should be stressed, however, that the grammaticalization of posture verbs has occurred in languages across the world. In simple terms, grammaticalization can be defined as (i) the evolution of a lexical item to a grammatical item or (ii) the evolution of a grammatical item to a form that is even more grammatical. An example of the first kind of evolution would for instance be the gradual change of a lexical verb to an auxiliary, as for instance has happened with the English lexical verb *go* that has evolved to an auxiliary marking the future tense, as in *I am going to sing* (or even *I'm gonna sing*). An example of the second evolution would be if the evolution of such an auxiliary were to continue even further to, for example, a bound grammatical morpheme. The French future tense morpheme is an oft-cited illustration of such an evolution (lexical verb > auxiliary > morpheme). In Lecture 5, we mentioned such a case as well in the language Ese Ejja, where the verb *ani*
'sit' has grammaticalized to a grammatical marker of the present tense.

In this lecture, we will look at the grammaticalization of posture
verbs to aspectual markers. More specifically, we will discuss how posture
verbs (and by extension, other locative verbs and motion verbs) express
progressive or durative aspect, i.e. the idea that the action is ongoing at
the moment of speech or has been ongoing for some time. In some cases,
posture verbs will also express habitual aspect, which presents the process
as occurring at regular intervals (not necessary continuously). If one looks
at how progressive aspect is expressed in the languages of the world, one
notices that these expressions are often derived from spatial expressions,
such as locative verbs, motion verbs, or spatial prepositions (see Comrie
1976; Heine et al. 1991, Bybee et al. 1994, Kuteva 1999, Bertinetto et al.
2000). This is not the only source for expressions marking progressive
aspect, but it is a recurrent phenomenon across languages in the world.
The reason for this, as observed in the literature, is the experiential
alignment of location and events or actions occurring in that location.
As Comrie observes (using Dutch as an example, moreover), '[t]he
most widespread parallel is between progressive aspect and expressions
referring to the place where something is located' (1976: 98). Similarly,
Bertinetto et al. observe that 'the original meaning of most PROG devices
must have been that of a stative construction, expressing the idea of being
(i.e. finding oneself/itself) in a state'(2000: 539).¹ Bybee et al. (1994)
also refer to this link between state and activity when they refer to 'the
location of an agent as in the midst of an activity' (Bybee et al. 1994: 133).

Taking the Germanic progressive constructions as an example
(recall that Dutch is a member of this family), the different possibilities
can be represented schematically as in Figure 14 (adapted from Ebert
2000, Bertinetto et al. 2000). As shown, the main distinction is between
constructions that originally were locational constructions and those
derived from other, more peripheral patterns.

The group based on locative expressions can further be divided in
three subgroups:
<figure><img src="image_26.png" /><figcaption>Figure 14. Schematic representation of the Germanic progressive constructions</figcaption></figure>

(i) posture verb constructions (*POSTURAL* progressive) which use a cardinal posture verb (CPV) in combination with another verb, e.g. English *I am sitting and reading* or Dutch *Ik zit te lezen* (lit. I sit to read);

(ii) locative preposition constructions (*PREPOSITIONAL* progressive), e.g. *Jan was de auto aan het wassen* (lit. Jan was the car at the wash; with nominalised infinitive);

(iii) motion verb constructions (*MOTION* progressive), e.g. *Zij loopt de hele dag te zingen* (lit. she runs all day to sing).

The details of these constructions in the different languages do not concern us too much here, but it should be clear that each group construes the relationship between the action (or event) and the location differently. The *POSTURAL* progressive combines two verbs (one of which is a posture verb) in a monoclausal construction; essentially the origin of this construction is the simultaneous occurrence of two events, for example, sitting and reading. The *PREPOSITIONAL* progressive situates the Agent in the vicinity of the action which is represented as a location. This could be compared to English *He is at the university* but instead of a
true location (*university*), the progressive uses an event (expressed via a nominalized verb): ‘be at the V<sub>NOM</sub>’. Finally, the *MOTION* progressive is similar to the *POSTURAL* progressive with two simultaneous events, but this time with a motion event (expressed via a motion verb or another expression) instead of a static verb.

The group of progressive constructions not based on locative constructions are more varied in origin, but for the Germanic languages, they can be divided in two groups (not distinguished in Figure 14): (i) constructions with *BUSY*, such as *Ik ben bezig een brief te schrijven* (lit. I am busy a letter to write) and (ii) constructions with *HOLD*-verbs. The latter do not occur in Dutch, but in Swedish the progressive is commonly expressed via the (grammaticalized) verb *hålla* (‘hold’), e.g. *Jag hållar på att skriva ett brev* (lit. I hold on to write a letter = ‘I am writing a letter’). In what follows we will look at postural progressives in two languages, Dutch (drawing on Lemmens 2005b, 2015 and 2017b).

## 7.2 Locational progressive constructions in Dutch

As is already clear from Figure 14, Dutch has several ways to express progressive aspect:

(i) the *POSTURAL* progressive, which combines one of the posture verbs (*zitten* ‘sit’, *liggen* ‘lie’, and *staan* ‘stand’) with an infinitive complement specifying the main verb, e.g. *staan te wachten* lit. stand to wait (= be waiting);

(ii) the *PREPOSITIONAL* progressive, of the form *aan het V zijn* (lit. ‘at the V be’); this construction is built with the originally spatial preposition *aan* ‘at’ which takes a nominalized infinitive (specifying the ongoing event) as its object;

(iii) the *MOTION* verb progressive which is syntactically identical to the postural progressive but uses the motion verb *lopen* ‘run’ instead of a posture verb (*lopen te V* lit. ‘run to V’);
(iv) the **BUSY** progressive, which comes in two variant constructions:
*bezig zijn met* lit. 'be busy with' and *bezig zijn te V* lit. 'be busy to V'.

We will not be much concerned with the last two.² The focus of the present discussion will be on the **POSTURAL** and the **PREPOSITIONAL** progressive which are the most frequent progressive constructions in Dutch. For the sake of convenience, we will continue to use literal paraphrases of these Dutch constructions (e.g. 'sit to read' or 'be at the read') even if in English these formulations are not idiomatic. It should be clear that both constructions find their proper English equivalent in the *-ing* progressive (for the example at hand: *be reading*).

While both progressive constructions are locative in origin, the differences between these two constructions seem at first sight obvious: the posture verbs are semantically more specific than the general verb *zijn* ‘be’ given their reference to the subject referent’s posture (or orientation in the case of inanimate objects). Consider the following examples.

1. a. Ik **sta** te wachten. (lit. 'I stand to wait')

b. Ik **zit** tv te kijken. (lit. 'I sit tv to watch')

c. Ik **lig** te slapen. (lit. 'I lie to sleep')

In each of these sentences, the posture verb indicates that the speaker stands, sits, or lies while respectively waiting, watching TV, or sleeping. For each of those cases, a prepositional progressive (*Ik ben aan het wachten / tv-kijken / slapen* lit. 'I am at the wait/watch TV/sleep') is a perfectly acceptable alternative, which remains underspecified as to the Agent's posture. In other words, the **POSTURAL** progressive seems grammaticalized to a lesser degree than the **PREPOSITIONAL** progressive, in line with Hopper's (*semantic*) **persistance principle**. This principle refers to a grammaticalized form being constrained in its use by the original meaning of the lexical element: 'The principle of persistence relates the meaning and function of a grammatical form to its history as a lexical morpheme' (Hopper 1991: 28). The expectation is thus that the original
meaning of posture verbs imposes constraints its use and this much
more so than for the **PREPOSITIONAL** progressive. As explained above,
this construction is also derived from a locative construction with the
preposition *aan* ‘at’, but the auxiliary verb that is used here is the verb *zijn*
‘be’ (*aan het V zijn* ‘be at the V’) which does not express any information
regarding the posture or orientation of the Agent. In other words,
the three different situations in example 1 above can all be expressed
with one single progressive *Ik ben aan het lezen* ‘I am at the read’ which
neutralizes over the three different postures.

Two comments are in order here. First of all, as will be recalled from
the description in Lecture 5, Dutch posture verbs have expanded their
semantic range considerably and are also used to express the location of
inanimate entities. As can be expected, this ‘postural logic’ is continued
even in their aspectualized uses, as shown in the following examples.

(2) a. Een vrachtwagen **staat** voor ons te lossen.
     a truck stands in front of us to unload ('is unloading')

b. Het schip **lag** twee jaar later nog weg te roesten aan een kade in
Stockholm
the ship lay two years later still away to rust at a quay in Stockholm
('was rusting')

c. Grote stapels uien **liggen** nu bij de distributiecentra te rotten.
big heaps of onions lie now at the distribution centers to rot ('are
rotting')

d. Er **liggen** enorme problemen op hem te wachten.
there lie enormous problems on him to wait ('await him')

e. Het bier **zit** te rijpen in grote vaten.
the beer sits to ripe in big barrels ('is ripening/maturing')

The location of a truck is typically expressed by *staan* ‘stand’ as it is
an entity on its base. (Note the medio-passive reading here as well: it is
not the truck that is unloading, but being unloaded.) Ships in the water
are said to ‘lie’; if they are in the water and rusting, this can logically be
expressed with *liggen te roesten* ‘lie to rust’. Onions are round objects that do not have any dimensional differentiation; logically, they are coded with *liggen* ‘lie’. Also abstract entities (like problems) are coded with *liggen* and this postural logic continues in the aspectual construction *problemen liggen te wachten* ‘problems lie to wait’. Finally, beer in a barrel is a clear instance of containment, which typically is expressed by *zitten* ‘sit’, hence *zitten te rijpen* ‘sit to mature’.

These examples confirm that in Dutch the posture verbs have become basic locative verbs that are used (and mostly even obligatorily so) to express the location of any entity in space. According to Kuteva (1999), this use of posture verbs as basic locative verbs is one of the preconditions of the grammatical of posture verbs to aspectual auxiliaries.³

The second comment on the aspectual use of posture verbs is that they are often used in contexts where the event expressed by the complement verb (which, semantically, is actually the main verb of the clause as it describes the ongoing action) is semantically incompatible with the static situation expressed by the posture verb, as indicated by the following examples.

(3) a. ze **zaten** met de snelheid van een lift tien meters **op en neer te suizen** (INL)

they sat with the speed of a lift ten meters up and down to whizz (= were whizzing)

b. ... terwijl onze ploeg lamlendig **stond te hockeyen** (INL)

... while our team sluggishly stood to play hockey (= was playing)

c. Wat **zit** ik hier toch de hele dag **rond te lopen**? (pers. attestation)⁴

what sit I here PRT the whole day around to walk ('What on earth am I walking around here for?')

In these examples, a static posture verb is combined with a motion verb ('sit' + 'whizz', 'stand' + 'play hockey', and 'sit' + 'walk'). This is clear evidence that the posture verbs have been subject to semantic bleaching and no longer refer to the Agent's posture while doing these
actions. Also in the situations expressed in example 4 the posture of the Agent is no longer at issue for the verb *zitten* ‘sit’.

(4) a. Ik **zat** een jaar **te dubben** hoe ik weer aan de slag kon.

I sat a year to brood how I again to work could ('I have been brooding.')

b. Hij **zit** een groot deel van zijn tijd in harde steen **te boren**.

he sits a large part of his time in hard stone to drill ('is drilling').

In both cases, the human Agent is said to be engaged in an action (brooding and drilling), but these actions extend (possibly non-continuously) over a longer period of time. One could argue that in these cases, *zitten* ‘sit’ refers to some form of abstract containment where the Agent is contained (or even stuck) in the ongoing process. As illustrated in Lecture 5, such abstract containment reading is quite common for *zitten* ‘sit’, e.g. *Hij zit in een depressie* lit. ‘he sits in a depression’ (= he is depressed). This may explain why it is precisely *zitten* ‘sit’ that shows the largest semantic flexibility in aspectual uses.

Given that the posture verbs can be used in aspectual constructions where posture is no longer at issue and even completely backgrounded, they seem to have become interchangeable with the *aan het V zijn* ‘be at the V’ construction, as already explicitly pointed out in an early study by Brisau: ‘[t]he fact that [the verbs] *can be easily substituted* for one another when they are not in a context, points to their being subordinate to the main verb in meaning: *primarily they serve to indicate aspect*’ (1969: 75, my emphasis).⁵ The following pair (Internet examples) nicely illustrates the interchangeability of these verbs in reference to a plane shaking.

(5) a. Het hele vliegtuig **zat te schudden**. Ik ben blij dat de volgende keer ik een wat tammere vliegreis krijg.⁶

The whole plane sat to shake (= was shaking). I am glad that the next time I get a somewhat calmer flight

b. Het vliegtuig was **aan het schudden**, net alsof je een tattoo zou
laten zetten terwijl je over rotsen aan het rijden bent.⁷

The plane was at the shake (= was shaking), as if you'd have a tattoo being placed while you are driving (lit. be at the ride) over rocks

In 5a, *zitten* ‘sit’ has lost all reference to posture, and even to native speakers of Dutch, it may not at all be clear what the difference is with the alternate coding in 5b; in both cases, the plane is merely shaking. Ebert (2000) attributes to difference to the speaker’s personal preference.

Despite this seeming interchangeability, we adopt the cognitive view that a difference of form (in principle) entails a difference of meaning and hypothesize that, even if there exist contexts in which both **POSTURAL** and **PREPOSITIONAL** progressives can be used, there remain (subtle) semantic differences between the two. On the basis of the corpus analysis described below, we show how the two constructions indeed have their own semantic profile. In a nutshell, the difference can be summarized as follows. First, the collostructional analysis on our corpus data reveals that the two constructions significantly differ in the type of verbs that they co-occur with. In addition, looking at the larger contextual features of these constructions (as revealed by adverbial modifiers) shows that the **PREPOSITIONAL** progressive (*aan het V zijn* ‘be at the V’) has a **processual focus**, while the **POSTURAL** progressive (*liggen/zitten/staan te V* ‘lie/sit/stand to V’) has a **situational focus**.

## 7.3 Comparison of POS and PREP progressives

To examine the different contexts of use of the **POSTURAL** and **PREPOSITIONAL** progressive, we have analyzed these constructions in the INL corpus already introduced in the previous lecture. Our study has been limited to the written data from this corpus (which in total contains 38 million words), and includes a variety of texts, exclusively non-fictional; the vast majority of them or written. The sub-corpus that we have used
concerns contemporary (1970–1995) written Dutch (nonfiction), in total about 26.4 million words, of which 90% Netherlandic Dutch. The largest part of this corpus concerns newspaper articles.

The INL corpus search engine has allowed a fairly exhaustive extraction of sentences with either the *POSTURAL* or the *PREPOSITIONAL* progressive. All of the constructions that did not correspond to the target constructions (progressives) were manually removed. After this manual clean-up we retained a total of 1,373 occurrences of the *POSTURAL* progressive and 1,040 of the *PREPOSITIONAL* progressive (a ratio of about 57% vs. 43%). All these sentences were subsequently coded in a spreadsheet for a number of variables such as the type of main verb, Agent, adverbial complements, etc.

A logical point of departure for the comparison between the *POSTURAL* and the *PREPOSITIONAL* progressive is to look at the verbs that occur in the constructions and to measure to what extent they are the same. On the basis of the calculation of the proportion of shared verbs, one can determine the extent of semantic similarity between the two constructions. Table 22 compares the type and token frequencies for the two constructions and their degree of overlap.

<table><caption>**Table 22. Degree of overlap of verbs in the two progressive constructions (type-token ratio)**</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>POS</th><th>PREP</th></tr><tr><th></th><th>Freq</th><th>Freq</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>WW token frequency</td><td>1,373</td><td>1,040</td></tr><tr><td>WW type frequency</td><td>354</td><td>447</td></tr><tr><td>Type/token ratio</td><td>0.26</td><td>0.43</td></tr><tr><td>WW token overlap</td><td colspan="2">602 on 2,413 (24.9%)</td></tr><tr><td>WW type overlap</td><td colspan="2">74 on 727 (10.1%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

For the *POSTURAL* progressive there is comparatively less variation in the verbs than for the *PREPOSITIONAL* progressive: there are 354 different verbs on a total of 1,373 attestations (type/token ratio = 0.26) vs. 447
different verbs (types) on a total of 1,040 attestations (type/token ratio = 0.43) for the **PREPOSITIONAL** progressive. Since, strictly speaking, we are dealing with three constructions for the **POSTURAL** progressive (given that there are three different posture verbs), one could argue that the above ratio is not correct but should be the average of the three individual type/ token ratios. This gives a ratio of 0.33 (T/t ratio *liggen*=0.38; T/t ratio *staan*=0.32; T/t ratio *zitten*=0.30). That reduces the differences between the two constructions to some extent, but it still remains true that even in the calculation that favours the **POSTURAL** progressive, the variation is still the largest for the **PREPOSITIONAL** progressive.

A second, more interesting observation that can be derived from Table 22 is that there actually is very little overlap between the two constructions in terms of the choice of verb. On the total attestations (2,413) there are only 602 attestations (24%) which have a verb that is shared by the two constructions. The most frequently shared verbs are: *kijken* ‘watch’ (93); *spelen* ‘play’ (56); *praten* ‘talk’ (41); *doen* ‘do’ (28); *lezen* ‘read’ (25); *eten* ‘eat’ (24); *trainen* ‘practice’ (19); *onderhandelen* ‘negociate’ (18); *zoeken* ‘search’ (18); *schrijven* ‘write’ (17); *mediteren* ‘meditate’ (15); *vergaderen* ‘meet’ (15); *maken* ‘make’ (12); *drinken* ‘drink’ (11); *zweten* ‘sweat’ (11); *roesten* ‘rust’ (9); *zingen* ‘sing’ (8); *rotten* ‘rot’ (7); *dansen* ‘dance’ (7). The high frequency of some of these verbs (such as *kijken* ‘watch’ and *spelen* ‘play’) distorts the picture somewhat. Suppose that of the 93 attestations with *kijken* ‘watch’, 92 occur in the **POSTURAL** progressive and only 1 in the **PREPOSITIONAL** progressive, then 93 would still be taken as the frequency of overlap, which does not correspond to the actual weight of the overlap. That is why Table 22 also presents the degree of overlap in terms of type frequency. In this calculation every overlap gets the value 1 irrespective of the token frequency of the verb in one or the other construction (or both). For example, the token overlap frequency for *kijken* ‘watch’ (93) is thus reduced to 1. The total degree of overlap is then given by the sum of all these. In this calculation, a meagre 10% is retained as the degree of overlap (74 types on a total of 727 types). This
clearly indicates that the number of verbs that occur in both of these two constructions is actually fairly limited. This is a first indication that the semantic overlap between the constructions is fairly small, at least with respect to the verbs that occur in it. The collostructional analysis that we present next takes this one step further.

The degree of overlap between the **PREPOSITIONAL** and the **POSTURAL** progressive is fairly limited, which suggests that both constructions have a preference for different types of verbs. One method to investigate which verbs have a preference for one or the other construction is a collostructional analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004; Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003, 2005), and more specifically, a distinctive collexeme analysis. As will be remembered from the explanation of this method in Lecture 3, this measures to what extent individual verbs are significantly attracted to (or repelled) the two respective progressive constructions.

For a distinctive collostructional analysis four frequencies are needed for each verb: (i) the frequency of the verb in the **POSTURAL** progressive, (ii) the frequency of that same verb in the **PREPOSITIONAL** progressive, (iii) the total frequency of verbs in the **POSTURAL** progressive, and (iv) the total frequency of verbs in the **PREPOSITIONAL** progressive. These last two are necessary to set a statistical baseline, which brings the ‘competition’ into the equation, based on the total frequency of the verbs. On the basis of these four frequencies, one can run a 2-by-2 significance test (in this case a Fischer Exact test). Table 23 illustrates this with the verb *doen* ‘do’ which occurs in both constructions. The expected frequencies are put in between brackets.

<table><caption>**Table 23.** Distinctive collostructional analysis for *doen* ‘do’ in POS vs. PREP progressive</caption><thead><tr><th>Corpus: INL</th><th>doen 'do'</th><th>Other verbs</th><th>Row total</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>POSTURAL progressive</td><td>7 (exp.= 20.5271)</td><td>347</td><td>354</td></tr><tr><td>PREPOSITIONAL progressive</td><td>29 (exp.= 15.4729)</td><td>418</td><td>447</td></tr><tr><td>Column total</td><td>36</td><td>765</td><td>801</td></tr></tbody></table>
On the basis of this table we can calculate the collostructional strength for the verb in question, represented in the form of a log-transformed p-value of a one-tailed Fischer Exact. The higher this value, the more distinctive the verb is for one particular construction. As threshold values, the following have been set: Coll.strength>3 => p<0.001; coll.strength>2 => p<0.01; coll.strength>1.30103 => p<0.05. In other words, if the collostructional strength value is lower than 1.30103, then the result is non-significant. For *doen* ‘do’, the (log-transformed) value is 5.4062 (the actual, non-transformed p-value of the Fischer Exact test for Table 23 is 0.0014); since this value is higher than 1.30103 and even higher than 3, the verb is significantly attracted to one of the two constructions. To determine which of the two, one has to consider the difference between the expected and the observed frequencies; for *doen* one sees that the observations for the PREPOSITIONAL progressive (29) are higher than expected (15.47), from which one can conclude that the verb is more attracted to the PREPOSITIONAL progressive than to the POSTURAL progressive, and consequently can be considered distinctive for it.

Table 24 gives the calculation of collocational strength for all of the verbs that are significantly attracted to one of the two constructions in the INL-corpus. The degree with which a verb is attracted to a construction is inversely proportional to the degree of repulsion to the other.

<table><caption>Table 24. Significantly distinctive verbs in POS and PREP progressive</caption><thead><tr><th colspan="3">Distinctive for POS progressive</th><th colspan="3">Distinctive for PREP progressive</th></tr><tr><th>Verb</th><th>N</th><th>coll. strength</th><th>Verb</th><th>N</th><th>coll. strength</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>wachten 'wait'</td><td>319</td><td>85.5959</td><td>worden 'become'</td><td>59</td><td>20.503</td></tr><tr><td>kijken 'watch'</td><td>91</td><td>17.647</td><td>veranderen 'change'</td><td>41</td><td>15.2336</td></tr><tr><td>slapen 'sleep'</td><td>58</td><td>14.3776</td><td>oefenen 'practice'</td><td>23</td><td>8.4953</td></tr><tr><td>springen 'jump'</td><td>40</td><td>9.8654</td><td>bouwen 'build'</td><td>19</td><td>7.0087</td></tr><tr><td>trappelen 'trample'</td><td>40</td><td>9.8654</td><td>voorbereiden 'prepare'</td><td>19</td><td>7.0087</td></tr></tbody></table>

(continued)