Guest (guest)
IP: 3.239.11.40
10
komen ‘come’ + Verb of Movement
Diatopic and Semantic Variation in Spoken Varieties of Dutch
Jef frey Pheif f
Institut für Germanistik Universität Bern
jef frey.pheif f@germ.unibe.ch
Lea Schäfer
Philipps-Universität Marburg
lea.schaefer@staf f.uni-marburg.de
Abstract
Periphrastic constructions with come have primarily been grammaticalized
to express tense in Indo-European languages (Devos & van der Wal 2014). In
the Germanic language group, come has not undergone grammaticalization
to the same degree that related go has. Nevertheless, this verb has acquired
some special functions when used in combination with other elements. One
of them concerns the combination of come with a motion verb. In Standard
Dutch, the choice of the morphological form ( inf/ ptcp) of the movement
verb in this construction is variable (Haeseryn et al. 1997): De agent kwam
de straat ingef ietst.ptcp /inf ietsen.inf ‘The pol ice of ficer came cycl ing
into the street’. This contribution investigates this special construction
in terms of diatopic and register variation as well as from a semantic-
functional perspective. We performed an experiment in which we tested
for geographic and semantic factors. The results show that the distribution
of the variants is not regionally conditioned contrary to our expectations.
Instead, the inf initive variant is the preferred variant across all regions in
regional Dutch. We then discuss the results for the semantic factors that
we systematically integrated into the test conditions, i.e. lexical semantics
and path and manner as has been previously proposed in the literature
(Ebeling 2006, Honselaar 2010, Belien 2016). The results of a regression
analysis do not conform to expectations. We reflect on the results and
propose an alternative hypothesis, based on Schäfer (2020), proposing that
TAAL & TONGVAL 74.1 (2022) 10-54
HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5117/TET2022.1.002.PHEI
© Jefrey Pheif & Lea Schäfer
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0