What native speaker judgments tell us about the grammaticalization of a progressive aspectual marker in Dutch
This paper focuses on native speaker judgments of a construction in Dutch that
functions as a progressive aspectual marker (aan het X zijn, referred to as
aan het-construction) and represents an event as in progression at the time of
speech. The method was chosen in order to investigate how native speakers
assess the scope and conditions of use of a construction which is in the process
of grammaticalization. It allows for the inclusion of a large group of participants
of different age groups and an investigation of potential age-related differences.
The study systematically covers a range of temporal variables that
were shown to be relevant in elicitation and corpus-based studies on the grammaticalization
of progressive aspect constructions. The results provide insights
into the selectional preferences and constraints of the aan het-construction in
contemporary Dutch, as judged by native speakers, and the extent to which
they correlate with production tasks.
Share this page