A contrastive analysis of placement verbs in German and Dutch

Hermann, Manon [UCL]

German and Dutch are two closely related Germanic languages that use many posture and placement verbs, not only to describe the concrete position of an entity, but also to designate its location in space (cf. Lemmens 2002; 2006, De Knop and Perrez 2014). In this paper we study the use of the verbs Germ. stellen/Dt. stellen ('to put in a standing position'), Germ. setzen/Dt. zetten ('to put in a sitting position') and Germ. versetzen/Dt. verzetten (‘to put/move’) in abstract and fixed phrases, such as Germ. an den Pranger stellen (‘to put in the pillory’), Dt. in de bloemetjes zetten (literally 'to put in the flowers' = ‘to treat like a king’). Among these phrases we are looking more specifically at the subcategory of complex noun-verb phrases (commonly referred to as “Funktionsverbgefüge” in German) like Dt. in beweging zetten (‘to bring to motion’), Germ. in einen Ausnahmezustand versetzen (‘to put into a state of emergency’). An analysis of data from the corpora DeReKo, Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands, deTenTen13 and nlTenTen14 in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics shows that the use of these verbs is not arbitrary. In fact, the selection of the verbs is linked to specific conceptualizations like Force, Dynamicity and Control, to name just a few. Hence, the present contribution shows that a perfect analogy between German and Dutch cannot be assumed at all. In fact, the use of the placement verbs, which at first sight seems very similar in both languages, is characterized by some important differences.