‘This doesn’t sit well in English.’ What has happened to English posture verbs?

Abstract: In the Germanic languages, the posture verbs LIE, SIT, and STAND, generally cover a large semantic field and in contrast to, for example, Romance languages, the use of these verbs is often obligatory when one wants to express the location of an entity in space, or in metaphorical extensions thereof (see Lemmens 2005a, Talmy 2000). In most Germanic languages, these verbs have also grammaticalized to semi-auxiliaries in constructions that have a progressive value (e.g., Jag sitter och läser / Ik zit te lezen / I sit and read). 

In addition to the striking difference between Germanic and Romance languages, there is, however, considerable variation between the different Germanic languages (see also Ameka & Levinson 2007), and even within one language. Most strikingly, English seems to be the odd one out, in that it no longer uses posture verbs to the same degree as in the other Germanic languages but prefers neutral be for expressing locative events (e.g., The bottle is on the table, rather than The bottle stands/is standing on the table). 

This presentation will start with a short presentation of my cognitive semantic analysis of posture verbs, as maximally visible in present-day Dutch, which seems to have pushed the use of posture verbs furthest, since these verbs are the default (i.e. obligatory) choice for expressing any locative event (including metaphorical location) and showing highly grammaticalized aspectual uses (see Lemmens 2002, 2005b, 2017, 2021:Ch.5-8). 

In the second part of the presentation, we will show how in earlier periods, English used to have similar uses but seems to have lost these along the way, which might be considered as a story of grammaticalization cut-short (Lemmens 2014, Lesuisse & Lemmens 2018). We will briefly consider some hypotheses that might explain this change of direction in English. 

In the third and last part, we will return to a more typological perspective and present an experimental study (Lesuisse & Lemmens 2023) that probes into how speakers of present-day English, Dutch and French may differ in their mental representation of locative events as influenced by the recurrent patterns in their language (including varying degrees of using posture verbs). The picture that emerges from these experiments is nuanced and intricate, with English speakers sometimes behaving like French speakers, sometimes like Dutch speakers.

References

Ameka, F. K. & S. C. Levinson 2007. The typology and semantics of locative predicates: posturals, positionals, and other beasts. Linguistics 45, 847-871.

Lemmens, M. (2002). The semantic network of Dutch posture verbs. In Newman, J. (ed.), The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing, and Lying. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 103-139.

Lemmens, M. (2005a). Motion and location: toward a cognitive typology. In Girard, G. (red.), Parcours linguistiques. Domaine anglais. [CIEREC Travaux 122], Publications de l’Université St Etienne, 223-244.

Lemmens, M. (2005b). Aspectual posture verb constructions in Dutch. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17.3, 183-217.

Lemmens, M. (2014). Une grammaticalisation ratée ? Une étude diachronique de stand en anglais. Anglophonia 18, http://anglophonia.revues.org/327

Lemmens, M. (2017). A Tale of Two Progressives. In: Anastasia Makarova, Stephen M. Dickey, and Dagmar S. Divjak, eds. Each Venture a New Beginning Studies in Honor of Laura A. Janda. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 175–194.

Lemmens, M. 2021. Usage-based perspectives on lexical and constructional semantics. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Languages University Press.

Lesuisse, M. & M. Lemmens. 2018. “Grammaticalisation cut short: a diachronic constructional view on English posture verbs” In: Coussé, E., P. Andersson, & J. Olofsson (eds.) Grammaticalisation meets Construction Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 43-73.

Lesuisse, M. & M. Lemmens. 2023. “Looking differently at locative events: the cognitive impact of linguistic preferences”. Language and Cognition 16(3):1-29.

Talmy, Leonard. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics (Volume I & II). Cambridge, MA: MIT-press.

See also

• The Survey of English Usage
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