On the use of the Dutch posture verbs ‘staan’, ‘liggen’ and ‘zitten’ by German- and French-speaking learners of Dutch

De Knop, Sabine;Perrez, Julien
(2010) A Germanic Sandwich 2010: Dutch between English and German, A comparative linguistic conference — Location: University of Oldenburg (Germany) (17.September.2010)

Files

GermanicSandwich2010_Talk.pdf
  • Open Access
  • Adobe PDF
  • 1.56 MB
Download

Details

Authors
Abstract
It is generally acknowledged that French-speaking learners of Dutch have considerable difficulties with the use of the posture verbs staan ('stand'), liggen ('lie') and zitten ('sit'). This can be explained by the typological differences between satellite-framed Germanic languages (Talmy 2000), which favour the use of manner verbs to describe location (and motion), and verb-framed Romance languages, in which location is mostly expressed by a neutral verb (e.g., French être ‘to be’ or se trouver ‘to find oneself’). The difficulties that French learners encounter with Dutch posture verbs have been confirmed by a quantitative and qualitative corpus study (Lemmens and Perrez, in press), indicating that in their foreign language productions French speakers tend either to underuse posture verbs or occasionally to overuse them in contexts where no such verb is allowed (‘posture verb panic’). Against the background of the study by Lemmens and Perrez (in press) our presentation will report on the results of a similar corpus-based study led among German-speaking learners of Dutch, aiming at identifying similar patterns of under- or overuse of Dutch posture verbs. Because of the typological closeness between Dutch and German, one would expect German-speaking learners of Dutch to face fewer difficulties in the use of these verbs than French-speaking learners (see De Knop and Dirven (2008), Kutscher and Schultze-Berndt (2007), and Serra Borneto (1996) for a description of the semantic networks of German posture verbs). A first look at the quantitative data however seems to suggest that German-speaking learners tend to underuse Dutch posture verbs in their L2 productions as well - but to a lesser extent than French-speaking learners. This observation allows to conclude that the use of staan, liggen and zitten by German-speaking learners might not be as unproblematic as expected. Our study will further present a qualitative analysis of the contexts in which Dutch posture verbs are used by German-speaking learners in order to assess (i) to what extent their use is problematic or not for these learners, and (ii) to what extent the contexts in which the posture verbs are used by these learners can be characterized in terms of the typological differences between Dutch and German (see also Lemmens 2002). Comparing L2 productions by French-speaking and German-speaking learners should further allow us to draw conclusions about L2 acquisition patterns of Dutch posture verbs and more precisely to evaluate to what extent the acquisition of these verbs is related to transfer phenomena from L1 or to developmental features bound to the acquisition of L2. The results of our study should finally allow us to suggest avenues for a better foreign language teaching methodology in this domain. References De Knop, S. & R. Dirven. 2008. Motion and location events in German, French and English: A typological, contrastive and pedagogical approach. In De Knop, S. & T. De Rycker (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar – A Volume in Honour of René Dirven, 295-324. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kutscher, S. & E. Schultze-Berndt. 2007. Why a folder lies in the basket although it is not lying : the semantics and use of German positional verbs with inanimate Figures. Linguistics 45(5-6), 983-1028. Lemmens, M. 2002. The semantic network of Dutch posture verbs, In Newman, John (ed.), The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing and Lying, 103-139. [Typological Studies in Language 51]. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lemmens, M. & J. Perrez in press. “On the use of posture verbs by French-speaking learners of Dutch: A corpus-based study”. Cognitive Linguistics. Serra Borneto, C. 1996. “Liegen and stehen in German: A study in horizontality and verticality”. In: Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods, E. Casad (ed.), 458-505. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Talmy, L. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Affiliations

Citations

  • APA
  • Chicago
  • FWB

De Knop, S., & Perrez, J. (2010). On the use of the Dutch posture verbs ‘staan’, ‘liggen’ and ‘zitten’ by German- and French-speaking learners of Dutch. A Germanic Sandwich 2010: Dutch between English and German, A comparative linguistic conference, University of Oldenburg (Germany). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/190451