oa Zit je te denken of ben je aan het piekeren?

Persistence in the synchronic use of prepositional and postural progressive constructions in Dutch

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). Both constructions have in common that they cannot occur with stative verbs, both are grammaticalised constructions with locative origins, and both can often occur with the same verbs. However, we argue 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.