komen ‘come’ + Verb of Movement: Diatopic and Semantic Variation in Spoken Varieties of Dutch

• Published in: Taal en tongval Vol. 74; no. 1; p. 10
• Main Authors: Pheiff, Jeffrey, Schäfer, Lea
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Dutch
• Published: Amsterdam Amsterdam University Press 01.01.2022
• Subjects: Dialects; Dutch language; Germanic languages; Grammaticalization; Indo-European languages; Infinitives; Lexical semantics; Morphology; Periphrasis; Semantics; Syntactic movement; Syntactic structures; Tense; Verbs; Yiddish language
• ISSN: 0039-8691; 2215-1214
• DOI: 10.5117/TET2022.1.002.PHEI

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 ingefietst.ptcp /infietsen.inf ‘The police officer came cycling 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 infinitive 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, Beliën 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 the infinitive variant is the result of a stalled grammaticalization process, in which komen is – or better was – on its way toward becoming a future auxiliary. Future work will have to test this hypothesis.