"Lying in the air but standing in the cold": A contrastive study of nominal phrases with posture verbs in German and Dutch

Hermann, Manon
(2018) CogLing Days (Belgium Netherlands Cognitive Linguistics Association) — Location: Université catholique de Louvain (13.December.2018)

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Abstract
German and Dutch are two closely related Germanic languages that use many posture verbs, not only to describe the concrete position of an entity, but also to designate its location in space (see De Knop & Perrez 2014 and Lemmens 2006). In this contribution we study the use of Germ./Dt. verbs stehen / staan ('to stand') and liegen / liggen ('to lie') in abstract and fixed phrases, such as Germ. in der Luft liegen (literally 'to lie in the air' = 'to be in the wind, to be expected'), Dt. in de kou laten staan (literally 'leave sb. standing in the cold' = ‘to ignore or exclude sb.’). Among these phrases we are looking more specifically at the subcategory of complex noun-verb phrases (commonly referred to as "Funktionsverbgefüge" in German). In these constructions the noun carries the main meaning and the verb has only a functional role (see Fleischer 1997 and Eisenberg 2013). Examples: Germ. zur Verfügung stehen / Dt. ter beschikking staan ('to make available'). Numerous examples from the corpora "DeReKo" (IDS) and "Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands" are analysed, with two aims: (1) On the basis of Serra-Borneto (1996) and Lemmens (2006), we focus on the opposition of Germ. stehen-liegen and Dt. staan-liggen in both languages in order to identify the conceptualizations that motivate their use. The conceptualizations of prepositions and nouns that are combined with the verb are also examined. E.g. the German verb stehen often occurs with a nominal group introduced by the preposition unter ('under') and including a noun that conceptualizes control: Germ. unter Beobachtung stehen ('to be under observation'), unter Druck stehen ('to be under pressure'). (2) In a contrastive German-Dutch analysis we compare each nominal phrase with its counterpart in the other language. We further examine the phrases’ constituents in both languages and also study their frequency. The use of posture verbs, which at first sight seems very similar in both languages, is however characterized by a large number of differences. Literature ▪ DE KNOP, S. & PERREZ J. (2014). Conceptual metaphors as a tool for the efficient teaching of Dutch and German posture verbs. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 12(1): 1-29. ▪ EISENBERG, P. (2013), Der Satz. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. ▪ FLEISCHER, W. (1997), Phraseologie der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ▪ LEMMENS, M. (2006), Caused posture: experiential patterns emerging from corpus research. In Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics. Corpus-Based Approaches to Syntax and Lexis, A. Stefanowitsch & S. Gries (eds). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ▪ SERRA-BORNETTO, C. (1996), 'Liegen' and 'stehen' in German: A study in horizontality and verticality. In Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods, E.H. Casad (ed.), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 458-505.
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Hermann, M. (2018). “Lying in the air but standing in the cold”: A contrastive study of nominal phrases with posture verbs in German and Dutch. CogLing Days (Belgium Netherlands Cognitive Linguistics Association), Université catholique de Louvain. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/213611