Dutch uses cardinal posture verbs (/zitten/ ‘to sit’, /staan/ ‘to stand’, and /liggen/ ‘to lie’) for all sorts of purposes, many of which have received considerable research attention — like the...Show moreDutch uses cardinal posture verbs (/zitten/ ‘to sit’, /staan/ ‘to stand’, and /liggen/ ‘to lie’) for all sorts of purposes, many of which have received considerable research attention — like the posture progressive, e.g. /zitten te lezen/ ‘lit. sit to read: to be reading’. This thesis investigates an understudied posture verb pattern in which a posture verb is combined with a complementive past participle, e.g. /zitten vastgeplakt/ 'lit. sit stuck: to be stuck' and /staan volgepriegeld/ 'lit. stand scribbled full: to be scribbled full'. Previous analyses disagree on the status of this pattern in terms of its productivity (is it fixed or are new combinations possible?), meaning (what does the pattern as a whole express?), and structure (is the complementive participle verbal or adjectival?). By examining over 6,000 attestations of the pattern in a corpus of written Dutch, this thesis evaluates these competing accounts, concluding that (i) the patterns are indeed productive; (ii) constraints on that productivity can be accounted for in terms of the meaning of the pattern as a whole, i.e. 'locativity' and 'resultativity'; and (iii) the pattern's syntax appears highly heterogeneous: some past participles behave like adjectives, others like verbs. Finally, I show that this heterogeneity is compatible with the semantic properties of past participles in general, and of the posture verb-participle pattern in particular.Show less
In his 2011 book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, David Crystal investigated the use of biblical idioms in English popular culture. Additionally, he compiled a list of eighteen...Show moreIn his 2011 book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, David Crystal investigated the use of biblical idioms in English popular culture. Additionally, he compiled a list of eighteen idioms that were first coined in the King James Bible. Following Crystal’s research topic, this paper investigated these eighteen idioms for frequency and variation in the TIME Magazine Corpus (1923-2006), which consists of 100 million words. The purpose of this paper was to establish the significance of these eighteen idioms in present-day American English. Idioms were searched in the corpus both in their original phrasing and variant forms. The most important conclusion that can be drawn from the results is that the extent to which a biblical idiom lends itself for variation is an important factor in its level of relevance in non-biblical contexts.Show less
