The Subjective Use of Postural Verb in Afrikaans (I): Evolution From Progressive to Modal

Abstract

A general linguistic use of progressive aspect is to express some kind of subjective meaning. In other words, this aspectual construction is applied to postulate the speaker's attitude towards or emotional involvement with a particular situation. Although this practice occurs in all three Afrikaans progressive constructions, it is clear that the postural progressive in Afrikaans in particular became specialised with respect to subjective expression. The CPV 1 en construction is even used in constructions that cannot be interpreted as progressive situations (for example, stative or anterior situation types), and furthermore this construction collocates significantly strongly with negative communication verbs (verbs like skinder 'gossip', kla 'complain' and pla 'bother'). The subjective use of progressive constructions in Afrikaans has not received much attention to date. In two complementary articles (this article and The subjective use of postural verbs in Afrikaans (II): a corpus analysis of CPV en in Zefrikaans) the development and use of the CPV en as a subjective or interpretative construction, are investigated. Based on a relevant literature review, the purpose of this article is to propose a development route for the evolution of the subjective CPV en construction; and to highlight some typical characteristics of the subjective CPV en construction, on the basis of a pilot corpus study. The modal CPV en construction develops in five phases. During the first two phases, the postural verb is used to express the physical or spatial orientation of the subject. During the third and fourth phases, the postural verb develops into an aspectual auxiliary verb. It is only in the fourth phase that the progressive construction is used in modal contexts. In the last, fifth phase, the progressive meaning of the CPV en construction fades completely and it evolves into a pure modal construction. The subjective CPV en construction is characterised by two typical characteristics: firstly, the construction is mostly used in negative contexts (such as insult, blame, self-reproach or judgement) and secondly, it is mainly used in informal or spoken language. It does not appear frequently in a corpus of written Standard Afrikaans.

Polysemous Posture in English: A Case Study of Non-literal Meaning

“…In Breton the interpretation is that an agent is intentionally doing something evaluated as bad (Hewitt 1986). In languages such as Dutch and Afrikaans (Lemmens 2005;Breed 2017;Fraser & Pots 2018, a.o. ) the posture verb in a verb cluster can carry an evaluation.…”

Pseudocoordination with posture verbs in Mainland Scandinavian: A grammaticalized progressive construction?

“…'A man then called and said that ..' 4 This subjective effect can also be achieved with some other pseudocoordination verbs, such as drive 'carry on' and gå (rundt) 'walk (about)'. Breed (2017) relates the subjective use of pseudocoordination to the subjective use of the progressive that can be found in English.…”

“…'This subjective use has a parallel in other languages. It is discussed byBreed (2017) for Afrikaans pseudocoordination, and byLemmens (2005:185) for Dutch posture verbs with infinitives. 4 Again, the relevant use of the posture verb can be found independently of pseudocoordination in Norwegian, as in(34).…”

Periphrastic Progressive Constructions in Dutch and Afrikaans: A Contrastive Analysis

“…Breed (2017) claims that posture verb constructions in Afrikaans (mainly sit en and staan en) have in fact specialized in informal spoken language to express only subjective/negative meanings (such as insult, blame, or self-reproach) and that, accordingly, they can even be used to refer to situations that are not ongoing.Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542717000022 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core.…”

“… 3 Breed (2017) claims that posture verb constructions in Afrikaans (mainly sit en and staan en) have in fact specialized in informal spoken language to express only subjective/negative meanings (such as insult, blame, or self-reproach) and that, accordingly, they can even be used to refer to situations that are not ongoing. …”