A Tale of Two Progressives
Résumé
This article presents a corpus-based comparison of the two most frequent progressive constructions in Dutch: the prepositional construction aan het INF zijn 'be at the INF' (PREP progressive) and the posture verb construction liggen/zitten/staan+te+INF 'lie/sit/stand+to+INF' (POS progressive). While both constructions can often occur with the same verbs, our study shows that each construction has its own semantic profile: the PREP progressive has a processual profile, zooming in on the ongoing process itself, whereas the POS progressive has a situational profile, typically locating the ongoing process in a well-described spatio-temporal frame. This profile is in fact a relic from their original postural use; as such, the POS progressive provides a good illustration of Hopper's (1991) persistence principle.
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