Abstract
AbstractThis article addresses the question of how and why verbs combine in complex verb constructions in Dutch. We discuss introspective data reported in reference grammars and add evidence from corpus data to uncover the systematic ways in which Dutch verbs combine. Our analysis shows that verbs expressing meanings such as tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality are organized in a semantic scope hierarchy; that is, some verb meanings systematically have scope over others but not the other way round. We argue that this scope hierarchy reflects hierarchies of functional categories, elaborated in both functional and generative frameworks.
Highlights
Dutch is known for its ability to combine a wide variety of verbs into complex verb constructions
We have made use of two linguistically annotated, present-day Dutch language corpora: the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN, Oostdijk 2000) and the Lassy Small Corpus. Our choice of these corpora was driven by several considerations: taken together, they represent a wide range of Dutch language in terms of register, medium and geography (Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch); they contain manually corrected/annotated information about lemmata, parts-of-speech and syntactic structure; and, they turn out to be of a large enough size to support our investigation into complex verb constructions, at approximately one million tokens each
Our corpus data (Table 15) show that perception and causative verbs are overwhelmingly used as nonfinite verbs in three-verb constructions
Summary
Dutch is known for its ability to combine a wide variety of verbs into complex verb constructions. This work is Cousseand Bouma ‘want’ and beginnen ‘begin’ are nonfinite (NF) and together form a verb cluster.. This work is Cousseand Bouma ‘want’ and beginnen ‘begin’ are nonfinite (NF) and together form a verb cluster.1 What makes this example interesting is its semantic oddity. The nonfinite verb willen ‘want’ has scope over the main verb beginnen ‘begin’, expressing that it is the wish of the subject to start to do something. The section will introduce hierarchies of functional categories as the main theoretical framework of this study. The article presents an exploratory investigation of three-verb constructions in a corpus of spoken and written present-day Dutch.
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