"Lying in the air but standing in the cold": A contrastive study of nominal phrases with posture verbs in German and Dutch

German and Dutch are two closely related Germanic languages that use many posture verbs, not only to describe the concrete position of an entity, but also to designate its location in space (see De Knop & Perrez 2014 and Lemmens 2006). In this contribution we study the use of Germ./Dt. verbs stehen / staan ('to stand') and liegen / liggen ('to lie') in abstract and fixed phrases, such as Germ. in der Luft liegen (literally 'to lie in the air' = 'to be in the wind, to be expected'), Dt. in de kou laten staan (literally 'leave sb. standing in the cold' = ‘to ignore or exclude sb.’). Amon... Mehr ...