On ‘sit’/‘stand’/‘lie’ auxiliation

Tania A Kuteva

doi:10.1515/ling.37.2.191

Article

On ‘sit’/‘stand’/‘lie’ auxiliation

Published/Copyright: February 27, 2008

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From the journal Volume 37 Issue 2

Abstract

This study focuses on the structure ‘sit’/‘stand’/‘lie’ + and + main verb, which has come to express the continuative/durative/progressive in Bulgarian as well as in a number of other languages. It is argued that the auxiliation of ‘sit’/‘stand’/‘lie’+and+main verb results as the “sedimentation” (i.e. grammaticalization) of all-too-common usage of the bodily posture verbs in the languages in which we observe it. The main claims made are that

i. the use of the posture-verb construction as an aspectual marker correlates with the use of the posture verbs as the UNMARKED/CANONICAL ENCODINGS OF SPATIAL POSITION OF OBJECTS;

ii. the tendency for a language to encode the spatial position of an entity in terms of the notions of sitting, or standing, or lying elevates the corresponding verb structures to the status of basic, most common verb expressions and thus makes them appropriate source structures in auxiliation.

*Correspondence address: University of Cologne, Institute of Africanistics, Meister Ekkehart Str. 7, 50923 Cologne, Germany.

Received: 1998-08-05

Revised: 1999-02-17

Published Online: 2008-02-27

Published in Print: 1999-03-01

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.37.2.191