A quantitative analysis of the use of posture verbs by French-speaking learners of Dutch

This article presents a study of the use of the Dutch cardinal posture verbs staan (‘stand’), liggen (‘lie’) and zitten (‘sit’) by French-speaking learners of Dutch; the data is drawn from a corpus of semi-spontaneous oral picture descriptions. Due to the typological differences between French and Dutch in the spatial domain (see Talmy 2000; Lemmens & Slobin 2008), the use of posture verbs is a highly problematic subject for French-speaking learners of Dutch. As a result, their interlanguage is typically characterized by an overall underuse of posture verbs as well as a confusion of the di... Mehr ...