Labile Relational Verbs in English and Their Dutch Counterparts a Contrastive, Corpus-Based Study of Bureaucratic Language

Home , Causative alternation, Inchoative verb, Labile verb

LABILE RELATIONAL VERBS IN ENGLISH AND THEIR DUTCH COUNTERPARTS A CONTRASTIVE, CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF BUREAUCRATIC LANGUAGE

Marthe Lemeire Studentennummer: 01404739

Promotor: Prof. dr. Miriam Taverniers

Masterproef voorgelegd voor het behalen van de graad van Master in de richting Taal- en Letterkunde: Nederlands – Engels Academiejaar: 2017 – 2018

Acknowledgements First of all I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. Dr. Miriam Taverniers for her guidance throughout my writing process and for answering my countless e-mails. Even when everything got very busy, she still helped me when I needed it. I also want to thank her for the faith she had in me when she asked me to continue research in this very complex domain of grammar. Secondly, I would like to thank three of my university friends. To begin with, Ellis Oosterlinck and Marlien Ruysschaert, who were always there to support me with their pep talks. Also, I would like to thank Kimberley Hellenbrand, who was equally struggling with writing a paper and with whom I could always share my thoughts. These friends helped me find the courage not to give up. Without everyone’s support I truly do not think I could have finished this thesis.

Table of Contents 1. Introduction ...... 5 2. Literature overview ...... 7 2.1. Lability in English ...... 7 2.1.1. Concept of lability ...... 7 2.1.2. Terminology ...... 8 2.1.3. Previous approaches ...... 9 2.1.4. Diagnostics ...... 13 2.1.5. Ergativization ...... 14 2.1.6. Lability in relational processes ...... 15 2.2. Ergativity in Dutch ...... 24 2.2.1. Periphrastic constructions ...... 24 2.2.2. Verbs with prefix ver- ...... 25 2.2.3. Reflexives ...... 26 2.3. Contrastive research ...... 29 3. Methodology ...... 31 4. Corpus Research ...... 35 4.1. Analysis ...... 35 4.1.1. Identify ...... 35 4.1.2. Turn ...... 37 4.1.3. Divide ...... 39 4.1.4. Develop ...... 41 4.1.5. Separate ...... 43 4.1.6. Associate ...... 45 4.1.7. Relate ...... 46 4.1.8. Link ...... 47 4.1.9. Compare ...... 49 4.2. Discussion ...... 51 4.2.1. English labile relational verbs in language use ...... 51 4.2.2. Correspondence with Dutch ...... 52 4.2.3. Dutch equivalents ...... 52 4.2.3.1. Nouns ...... 53 4.2.3.2. Expressions ...... 53 4.2.3.3. Verbs ...... 53 4.2.4. Categorization ...... 59 4.2.5. Final remarks ...... 60 4.2.6. Overview ...... 61 5. Conclusion ...... 67 6. References ...... 69

List of tables Table 1 Middle, effective and pseudo-effective constructions (Davidse 1992b) ...... 12 Table 2 Roles in an identifying relation (Halliday 1985: 125) ...... 17 Table 3 Types of assignment according to Matthiessen (1995: 318) ...... 18 Table 4 Overview of alternations according to Haspelmath (1993) ...... 22 Table 5 Overview of labile relational verbs (Lemeire 2017) ...... 23 Table 6 Number of hits in the Europarl V7 corpus...... 34 Table 7 Link compared to an alternation with argument reduction ...... 48 Table 8 Types and stems of ver-verbs according to Van de Beld (2010)...... 59 Table 9 English labile relational verbs and their equivalents in Dutch ...... 66

List of figures

Figure 1 Dixon's representation of nominative/ergative typology (1994: 9) ...... 8 Figure 2 Canonical event model (Lemmens 1998: 32) ...... 12 Figure 3 Transitive and ergative action chain model (Lemmens 1998: 33) ...... 13 Figure 4 Model of process types (Halliday 1985) ...... 16 Figure 5 Representation of Dutch translations (De Groote 2013: 50) ...... 30

1. Introduction

Ergativity is a well-known concept within English linguistics. The term refers to a phenomenon that allows certain verbs to occur in both a transitive and an intransitive construction. These constructions respectively have a causative and an inchoative sense. With respect to this, labile verbs are verbs that allow this alternation without any change in form. A prototypical example of such verbs is break, which can be illustrated by the example John broke the vase – The vase broke. This prototypical example, alongside others such as open, begin and change suggests that the phenomenon applies to the domain of material verbs, i.e. processes of doing (Halliday 1985:109). It has indeed long been assumed that the set of labile verbs in English is fairly stable, including verbs concerned with change, with movement and action and with starting something (Francis, Hunston, Manning 1996).

However, recent research has suggested that the scope of lability is expanding, not only within material processes, but also beyond its borders towards the domain of relational verbs (Lemeire 2017). These are processes of being; something is said to ‘be’ something else (Halliday 1985: 119). An example of such a labile relational verb is turn in the following construction pair (1):

(1) a. Her eyes turned green b. The contact lenses turned her eyes green

Turn establishes a relation between her eyes and green: her eyes become green. Therefore turn is a good example of a relational process. Also, example (1) proves that it can be used in both an intransitive inchoative sense (a) and a transitive causative sense (b). Moreover, the verb form does not change; therefore it can be called a labile relational verb. Turn is not an isolated example; a lot more relational verbs show aspects of lability. Other turn verbs such as convert, transform, transmute and many other verbs (prove, change, divide, fill, establish etc) support the hypothesis that lability can be found in relational processes. Although not all of these verbs conform to all characteristics of lability, they still prove useful for research on the expansion of lability. They show that there is a continuum from less to more prototypically labile relational processes (Lemeire 2017).

In this dissertation, I would like to elaborate on the work that has been done so far on labile relational verbs. Previously, I tried to provide proof for the expansion of lability to relational verbs and gave an overview of labile relational verbs (Lemeire 2017). However that overview is not at all complete and there are perhaps many more verbs to be discovered. Besides that, I investigated how these verbs behaved in their alternation. Some verbs show patterning that is identic to the prototypical labile alternation, others are a lot less prototypical. However, that only reflects their behaviour in a specific environment: the alternations used in Lemeire (2017) were specifically selected from a corpus in order to show the general possible patterns. A more interesting approach now would be to investigate how such verbs behave in real language use, using data from a corpus. Thus, the constructions in which they occur are a lot more complex but also more interesting. A second interesting angle of approach I would like to take is a comparative one, namely a comparison between English and Dutch. De Groote (2013) already did a contrastive research on ergativity in English, Dutch and German. However, that

5 was a quantitative research of a specific set of labile verbs that were not necessarily relational in the way that was defined in Lemeire (2017). The research focussed on deadjectival verbs with the causativizer -en and was based on language data (by using dictionaries) rather than user data (De Groote 2013: 44). In this dissertation, I would like to carry out a corpus-based contrastive study of a specific subset of labile relational verbs, namely those that take a preposition in both the causative and the inchoative construction. The research will be qualitative rather than quantitative and will be, for reasons already mentioned, based on data of language use rather than dictionaries. The aim will be to describe the equivalents that are used in Dutch to translate labile relational verbs from English, focussing on the nature of the equivalents: are they of the same nature as the English verbs or are they the result of translation strategies such as reflexives, periphrastic constructions and ver-verbs (De Groote 2013) or others?

The paper will be structured as follows: the first part of this paper offers a theoretical framework for contrastive research on lability in English and Dutch. I will start with lability in English: the concept of ergativity/lability will be discussed, together with terminology, previous approaches and diagnostics. Also the concept of ergativization will be touched upon. Then lability will be linked to relational processes on the basis of Lemeire (2017). After lability in English, I will discuss what is already known about lability in Dutch. Three strategies that are often used as translation strategies in Dutch will be described. In a last chapter, the two (lability in Dutch and English) will be combined in the description of a previous contrastive study by De Groote (2013). The second part of this paper is a contrastive corpus study, using the Europarl V7 corpus as a source of language in action. It provides data from proceedings from the European Parliament in 21 European languages and will be used to examine a set of labile relational verbs. The focus however will be on the Dutch equivalents which will first be analysed for each verb of the set separately. After that, there will be a discussion in which some overall tendencies will be described. In this study I hope to provide some insights in the Dutch equivalents of labile relational verbs and describe the possible processes that can be used to transfer the meaning of such verbs from English to Dutch.

2. Literature overview

2.1. Lability in English

2.1.1. Concept of lability

Labile verbs such as break are verbs that have both a transitive and an intransitive pattern. Within the alternation, there is a switch in causativity. The intransitive pattern expresses an inchoative meaning, suggesting that the events happen ‘by themselves’, or as if the usually inanimate subject is self-causing or self-affecting (McMillion 2006: 1). Therefore this construction is also called non-causative. The transitive construction on the other hand has a causative sense and expresses an “event in which the transitive subject causes some change in the direct object” (ibid). The alternation of labile verbs is therefore a type of causative-inchoative alternation. A last important feature of labile verbs is that the Object of the transitive pattern (2a) and the Subject of the intransitive construction that corresponds with it (2b), denote the same entity. This is patient-preserving lability (or P-lability) which is different to A- lability, or agent-preserving lability, in which it is the agent that is preserved in the two constructions (3) (Creissels 2014: 911).

(2) a. Johnny crashed the car. b. The car crashed. (McMillion 2006: 1) (3) a. John drinks tea. b. John drinks.

This way of defining lability must be interpreted within a wider context. Often, the term ergative is used for such verbs. Ergative verbs and their alternations are only a part of a wider concept: they are a subtype of ergativity, namely lexical ergativity. According to McGregor, the term ergativity in general refers to the phenomenon in languages where “the agent or ‘subject’ of a transitive clause […] shows patterning distinct from the actor or ‘subject’ of an intransitive clause” (2009: 480). This patterning can be lexical (in the argument structure of verbs), morphological or syntactic. It was the distinctive morphological patterning that was first defined as ergativity, more specifically a pattern of case-marking “in which the Agent is case-marked differently from an Actor and Undergoer, which are case-marked identically” (ibid.). This can be illustrated by the following example from Nyangu-marta (Pama- Nyungang, Australia) (McGregor 2009: 480-481):

(4) mirtawa-lu kuyi kampa-rna woman-ERG meat cook-NFUT1 ‘The woman cooked the meat’. (5) partany karnti-nyi mungka-nga Child climb-NFUT tree-LOC ‘The child climbed the tree’.

The Agent in the transitive clause (4), woman, is marked with an ergative marker, -lu. The Undergoer, meat, on the other hand is unmarked, just like the Actor of the intransitive clause (5), child. The latter is

7 called absolutive patterning, creating an ergative-absolutive system. Most languages however have a different patterning system: nominative-accusative. In that case, it is the Agent and the Undergoer that are marked in the same way. The following figure illustrates the case marking patterns, S = intransitive subject, A = transitive subject, O = transitive object:

A ergative nominative S absolutive accusative O Figure 1 Dixon's representation of nominative/ergative typology (1994: 9)

Later, the term ergative was also used for other phenomena, such as for a verb like break. This would suggest that ergativity can also be found in languages that are not ergative-absolute but nominative- accusative, albeit on another level. The same principle is indeed at work in a prototypical alternation such as (6), since “the Undergoers or the (a) sentences correspond semantically with the Actors of the (b) sentences, while the Agents of the (a) sentences have no corresponding roles in the (b) sentences” (McGregor 2009: 483). In these cases, the principle happens on the lexical-semantic level rather than the morphological level.

(6) a. The boys broke the window. b. the window broke.

There are different semantic types of ergative (labile) verbs. Verbs of change-of-state are probably the most prototypical and they constitute the biggest part, however a lot of verbs concern other semantic features such as change in quantity, aspect, movement etc. (McMillion 2006: 61). The Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns: Verbs provides a list of around 600 ergative verbs divided into three main groups: verbs concerned with change, with movement and action and with starting something (Francis et al 1996: 479). According to McMillion however, these groups “seem ad hoc and no motivations for these groups are given” (2006: 61). Interestingly, these categories seem to confirm what has long been assumed, namely that ergativity is a phenomenon to be found within the domain of what Halliday calls material verbs, or verbs of doing, that express actions and events (1985: 109).

2.1.2. Terminology

Given the fact that the term ‘ergativity’ refers to different phenomena, the terminology can become quite complex and even controversial. Since it was first used on the morphological level, i.e. for case-marking and cross-reference (McGregor 2009: 482), the term ergativity is not always accepted to denote the principle when it occurs on a lexical-semantic level. Verbs like break seem to have little to do with the typological concept at first sight, and some linguists do not want to use the term for such verbs. However, as already mentioned before, the same principle that is at work, but on a different level. But if the term

8 ergativity is also used for the lexical-semantic phenomenon, it would mean that every language possesses aspects of ergativity, since all languages have causative constructions in some way. On the other hand, only a quarter of the world’s languages shows ergativity on the morphological level (Dixon 1994: 20).

Even within the sense of lexical-semantic ergativity, the term is not always used to refer to the same phenomenon. According to Trask, it is a “label sometimes given to a canonical transitive clause whose subject is an agent, such as John read the book […] or to the subject NP in such a transitive clause” (1993: 93). That definition does not refer to the inherent characteristics of verb like break that allow a causative-inchoative alternation in any way. Moreover, his example verb read is not considered to be an ergative verb, since it does not meet the previously defined characteristics of such verbs. Also, an alternation with read shows A-lability, not P-labilty. Halliday (1994) uses the term ergative as a synonym of ‘causative’, others use it to refer to either the transitive or the intransitive member in the causative alternation (McMillion 2006: 8). McMillion also mentions that it can be used to refer to a set of verbs that allow a labile alternation, therefore focussing on the fact that the verb form does not change in the two constructions of the alternation. Given the complexity of the term, it must be used carefully when referring to the lexical-semantic verbs.

Another term often used with respect to verbs like break which has been mentioned before, is lability (McMillion 2006). In his work, McMillion describes the meaning, behaviour and structure of such labile verbs. However the term labile is also ambiguous. According to Trask, it is a “lexical verb which can be construed either transitively or intransitively”. This definition leaves aside the dimension of causativity and considers alternations with absolute transitives, such as John reads the book – John reads as labile alternations. These are non-labile according to McMillion. The term labile focusses on preservation of the verb form. For English, this is very interesting since, according to Haspelmath’s cross-linguistic study (1993), English “encodes causative and inchoative notions much more often as labile verbs” compared to other languages. Therefore the term labile is interesting when it comes to the study of these verbs in English. However, since this paper is a contrastive study of English and Dutch, labile might not always be the best choice of terminology, since Dutch often uses other strategies like reflexives and periphrastic constructions (De Groote 2013). However in this paper I will use the term labile rather than ergative in order to avoid any confusion or controversy with respect to other types of ergativity. Also, the starting point of this paper is labile verbs in English, which is another reason to opt for the term labile. The nature of the Dutch equivalents (either also labile or making use of other strategies) will be discussed.

2.1.3. Previous approaches

Lability has been studied from different perspectives, that use different terminology and have a different way of classification. The two main perspectives are the Formal (Government and Binding) tradition and the Cognitive and Functionalist tradition. They mainly differ from each other in the way in which they represent semantics and syntax: according to Formal approaches, syntax is autonomous from semantics, while for Functional approaches, semantics must also be applied to grammar. Meaning

9 motivates syntax, rather than transformation rules. Cognitive grammar suggests a continuum between grammar and lexicon, rather than a clear-cut distinction (Lemmens 1998: 8). I will give a brief overview of the two approaches.

With the ‘Unaccusative Hypothesis’, Perlmutter provides one of the most important insights within the Formal tradition (1978). This hypothesis focusses only on intransitive verbs of which there are two classes, Unergative and Unaccusative verbs, which have a “different underlying syntactic configuration” (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1994: 3). A distinction similar to this was also made in Relational Grammar: “verbs taking a final subject originating as an initial direct object (Unaccusatives) and verbs taking a final subject that was also an initial subject (Unergatives)” (Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Everaert 2004: 2). Looking at the deep structure of the construction, which is what Government and Binding focusses on, Unaccuvatives take a D-structure Object and no Subject, while Unergatives take a D-structure Subject and no Object. In other words, Unergatives have an external argument, Unaccusatives an internal argument. The distinction between the two classes can be illustrated by the following examples (Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Everaert 2004: 2):

(7) [VP V NP] = John came: Unaccusative

(8) NP [VP V] = John sings: Unergative

Cognitive and Functional grammar use different terminology. Rather than a distinction between Unaccusative and Unergative verbs, they make a distinction between a transitive and an ergative model. In contrast with the Unaccusative Hypothesis, these models cover both one- and two-participant verbs: both models can be applied to both types of verbs. The following examples illustrate the transitive and ergative system respectively in (9) and (10). In the transitive model, there is a difference in the use of the verb: kill – die is a causative inchoative verb pair. In other words, the verb form is not the same in the two constructions as is the case in the ergative model. Relational and Generative grammar do not make a distinction between the ergative and transitive one-participant constructions (9b) and (10b), or between the ergative and transitive two-participant constructions (9a) and (10a).

(9) a. John killed Mary. b. Mary died. (10) a. John suffocated Mary. b. Mary suffocated.

To avoid any confusion when it comes to the term ‘transitive’ (which is usually only used with two- participant verbs), Davidse uses the term ‘middle’ for one-participant constructions and ‘effective’ for two-participant constructions (1992b: 109). Lemmens on the other hand does not use ‘middle’ but ‘non- effective’ (1998: 46). This is less ambiguous, since the term ‘middle’ is also used for what is known as the ‘medio-passive’ construction, for example Stale bread cuts easily. Verbs in such constructions are often considered to belong to either the ergative or the transitive model.

Besides differences in terminology, there are some differences with respect to classification as well between the two traditions. One classification system within the Formal tradition is made on the basis of causation, either internal or external. According to Levin & Rappaport Hovav, a distinction can be made between three classes, taking into consideration the kind of causation as well as the possibility of the predicate to detransitivise (1994: 52). Unaccusative verbs are causative verbs that have the possibility to detransitivise, and therefore belong to the second category. Unergatives belong to the third category, since they have internal causation. a. Causative verbs which do not detransitivise: externally caused b. Causative verbs which do detransitivise: externally caused c. Intransitive verbs: internally caused

Another Formal classification is provided by Perlmutter, which also gives examples of verbs that belong to the different categories (1983, cited in Alexiadou e.a. 2004: 12-13): a) Generally unergative predicates: i. Predicates describing willed or volitional acts e.g. work, play, speak, talk, smile, dance; manner-of-speaking verbs e.g. whisper, shout, bellow; predicates describing sounds made by animals e.g. bark, quack, roar. ii. Certain involuntary bodily processes e.g. cough, sneeze, burp, sleep. b) Generally unaccusative predicates: i. Predicates expressed by adjectives in English; predicates describing size, shapes, weights, colours, smells. ii. Predicated whose initial nuclear term is semantically a patient e.g. burn, fall, drop, sink, float, tremble, shake; inchoatives e.g. break, melt, freeze, evaporate, solidify, crystallize, dim, redden, darken. iii. Predicates of existing or happening e.g. exist, happen, occur, take place. iv. Involuntary emission of stimuli e.g. shine, glow, clink, pop, smell, sting. v. Aspectual predicates e.g. begin, start, stop, cease. vi. Duratives e.g. last, remain, stay, survive.

Classification in Cognitive and Functional grammar is different. Davidse provides two models within Systemic Functional Grammar (1992b): A model of instigation of process for the ergative system (12) and a model of process and extension for the transitive system (11):

(11) The lion is running The lion is chasing the tourist. Actor Process Extension Actor Process Goal (12) The glass broke John broke the glass. Medium Process Instigation Instigator Process Medium

For the transitive system (11), it is the Actor which is the core participant, or the point of departure; it performs the action. It is also possible to add a Goal to the event, i.e. to extend the construction. The core participant of the ergative model (12) is the Medium and the event can be externally caused or instigated by adding an Instigator.

Davidse also adds a third category besides middle and effective constructions: the pseudo-effectives. An example of such a construction would be They crossed the field. It is a two-participant construction and it may seem effective at first. However when applying some tests, it proves to be not effective: it has a problematic passive and an ungrammatical do to thematic equative (1992b: 127). It is neither an intransitive, nor a transitive construction (it has no real Goal). The second ‘participant’ is what Halliday calls Range, i.e. the scope of the process (1985: 146). According to Davidse, these are no real participants (1992b: 125). Table 1 provides an overview of the different categories distinguished by Davidse:

Middle Effective Pseudo-effective Transitive The lion is running. The lion is chasing the hunter. They crossed the field. Actor-Process Actor-Process-Goal Actor-Process-Range Ergative The glass broke. He broke the glass. The car broke an axle. Medium-Process Instigator-Process-Medium Setting-Process-Medium Table 1 Middle, effective and pseudo-effective constructions (Davidse 1992b)

Within Cognitive Grammar, Langacker starts from a cognitive model that is “relevant to our conception of actions and events” (Lemmens 1998: 31). The canonical event model, represented in figure 2, shows transmission of energy through the double arrows, and a change of state of the Object through the squiggly arrow.

Ag Instr Pat Figure 2 Canonical event model (Lemmens 1998: 32)

This model can then be applied to both the ergative and the transitive system. In the case of the transitive system, the action chain is the natural construal model: “The participant marked NOM is head of the energy flow […]. The participant marked ACC lies downstream” (Lemmens 1998: 32-33). It is the other way around for the ergative system, where the mental path “runs counter to the flow of energy along an action chain” (ibid.). This is illustrated by figure 3. In the intransitive construction of an ergative alternation, the original energy ‘source’ does not have to be present, meaning that the thematic participant (e.g. The window in The window broke) is conceptually autonomous.

Transitive model: Ergative model: John shot Mary with a gun John broke the glass with a hammer

Ag Instr Pat Ag Instr Pat Mental path Mental path Figure 3 Transitive and ergative action chain model (Lemmens 1998: 33)

2.1.4. Diagnostics

There are different ways of identifying labile verbs and these can roughly be divided into diagnostics focussing on the syntactic properties of the verbs and diagnostics focussing on the semantics. They can be linked respectively to Government and Binding Grammar and Cognitive and Functional Grammar.

Syntactic diagnostics often work for other languages than English, e.g. impersonal passive for Dutch and German (Perlmutter 1978), use of the auxiliary ‘be’ (instead of ‘have’) for a lot of Germanic and Romance languages (Alexiadou et al. 2004: 5) and also ne-cliticization for Italian (Alexiadou et al. 2004: 6). These do not work for English since it lacks the necessary morphological clues to distinguish between Unergatives and Unaccusatives. However, there are some other syntactic tests provided by Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) for English. For example, the test with resultative constructions is, together with the causative alternation, the most reliable syntactic test in English. It suggests that unaccusative intransitives can occur in such a construction without a direct object, but unergative intransitives cannot. This can be illustrated by the following examples:

(13) The cake burned black. (14) *He shouted hoarse.

As a result of the burning, the cake got black, but this does not work for sentence (14). He did not get hoarse because of the shouting. In that case, a fake reflexive object would be needed: He shouted himself hoarse. Other syntactic tests are less reliable for English. There-insertion (there occurred and accident vs *there worked three people) and locative inversion (on the hill appeared a horse vs *in the kitchen cooked three people) are tests for what Levin & Rappaport Hovav call “surface unaccusativity” (1995). The latter only represents a subclass of Unaccusative verbs. Adjectival use of perfect participles is another syntactic test: the broken vase vs *the worked student.

Other tests focus on semantic aspects, for example the notion of control (Smith 1970: 107, cited in Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995: 103). From this view, labile verbs stand for events that are under the control of an external cause, which can be expressed as the Subject in the transitive use. Other verbs, like speak and laugh do not have a causative transitive use; this suggests internal control. The events can only be controlled “by the person engaging in it” (ibid.). Rather than the notion of control, Levin &

Rappaport Hovav distinguish between internally and externally caused events (1995: 91). The different kind of causation can be proven by some small tests: the agentive Subject of regular transitive verbs like read cannot be left out: *The book read. It can also not be replaced by a natural force: *The lightning read the book (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995: 103). For an ergative verbs like break, both constructions are possible: The vase broke and The storm broke the vase. This suggests that the verbs are not as closely related to the agentive Subject.

Another semantic aspect, which has been briefly touched upon before, is change of state or location. As already mentioned, the subcategorization of ergative verbs in Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns: Verbs contains a group of verbs that have to do with change (Francis et al. 1996). According to Hale & Keyser, verbs like break, dissolve, alter describe “a change in material integrity” (1987: 7, cited in Matsuzaki 2001: 63). A sense of change of state or location can also be found in the other groups of CCGPV, e.g. verbs concerned with starting something. However, verbs like cut express a change in material integrity but do not allow a causative alternation. Moveover, according to McMillion, a lot of labile verbs concern “movement, aspect, change in quantity, or other semantic features” (2006: 61). Therefore, the aspect of change of state should be taken into consideration together with other semantic aspects, rather than on its own.

A last semantic aspect is telicity, an aspectual characteristic. Telicity refers to a natural endpoint in time of the actions and events, i.e. the actions denoted by verbs are bounded by time, delimited (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995: 56). Telic verbs can occur with telic adverials, e.g. It happened in one minute, while they cannot occur with some adverbials of duration, e.g. *The accident happened for an hour (Matsuzaki 2001: 45). However, stay and remain, which are labile verbs, have no specific temporal delimitation, i.e. they are atelic. This proves once more that the different semantic aspects must be considered simultaneously when identifying the verbs, since they are not always very clear-cut.

2.1.5. Ergativization

According to Halliday, there is a phenomenon which he calls a “tendency to ergativization” (1985: 146). It basically implies that there are more and more verbs in the English language that become labile verbs while they used to be non-labile. This could for example happen when verbs that construe a transitive two-participant construction change overtime in that they also start to develop a one-participant construction. It seems that in the majority of the cases, it is this process that occurs. Halliday shows that often verbs of change with certain suffixes (-ate, -ize, -ify etc) undergo this type of ergativization (1985). This can be illustrated by the example below using the verb centralize (15). However it could also be the other way around: verbs that originally only occur in an intransitive construction with one participant can evolve to the point where they also construe transitive two-participant patterning. Davidse points out that “many initially purely intransitive processes have become representable as 'instigatable'” (1999: 116-117). This process can be illustrated by example (16) using the verb sit. For the latter, it can be noticed that there are certain semantic factors that are necessary on order to allow such two-participant constructions. As can be seen in (16)b, the Instigator (Mother) seems to be an essential aid for the

Medium (the baby), who cannot do the action on its own. However example (17) shows that it is not so straightforward. There are probably other criteria possible, but that discussion is not within the scope of this dissertation.

(15) a. The government centralized the department. b. The department centralized. (16) a. Mother sat on the bench. b. Mother sat the baby up. (17) The waiter sat us down at the table in front of the bar.

Within the phenomenon of ergativization, there is another process possible. It is not necessary to start from existing verbs that occur in either a one- or a two-participant construction and then evolve to the point where they allow a labile alternation: sometimes, new verbs can be introduced in the language that are labile from the beginning (and that do not undergo an evolution towards lability) (Halliday 1985: 146). One last finding worth mentioning is “the loss of the reflexive pronoun”, which is another reason why there are more and more labile verbs (Kulikov 2014: 872).

2.1.6. Lability in relational processes

The set of ergative verbs in English is assumed to be quite stable (McMillion 2006: 1), however Halliday proves otherwise with the “tendency of ergativization” (1985). Moreover, it has also long been assumed that ergativity is restricted to the domain of material processes, as already mentioned before. According to Davidse, in order to describe the grammar of material processes it is crucial to have an understanding of the ergative system (1992b: 107). However, recent research has suggested otherwise: lability might be expanding beyond the borders of material processes, towards the domain of what Halliday calls relational processes (1985: 119). Examples (18) and (19) illustrate lability at work in a relational process:

(18) Her eyes turned green. (19) Her contact lenses turned her eyes green. (Sinclair 2000: 1799)

Relational processes set up a relation between two entities. In the example, turn establishes a relation between her eyes and green: her eyes became green. Clearly, something is said to ‘be’ something else (Halliday 1985: 119). This ‘being’ however not in the sense of just existing; for those types of verbs, Halliday provided a separate type of process namely existential processes. An example of such a process is There was a storm. Other process types are verbal, mental and behavioural, but whether ergativity is present in these processes is yet to be researched. These process types make up reality and allow the clause to model experience.

Figure 4 Model of process types (Halliday 1985)

Matthiessen has a different view on relational clauses. According to him there are two types: existential and expanding relational clauses (1995: 299). In other words, what Halliday considers as existential rather than relational processes, is considered to be part of the relational clauses according to Matthiessen. They “construe a mode of being where one participant, the Existent, is actualized (instantiated) as a member of a general class” (ibid.). He admits that, since there is only one participant, “the process is no true relation – no true expansion linking two participants” (1995: 300). For Halliday, this is a reason not to consider such clauses relational. Clearly, the characteristics and requirements for a process to be relational are different for both researchers, even within the same framework of Functional Linguistics. Expanding relational clauses match with Halliday’s group of relational processes. According to Matthiessen, these usually have two but sometimes thee participants. The latter will be a very important characteristic to prove the existence of lability in the domain of relational processes.

The relational processes can be subdivided on the basis of two dimensions at the same time: construction type and mode. The construction types are the following (Halliday 1985, Matthiesen 1995):

(a) Intensive ‘x is a’ (b) Circumstantial ‘x is at a’ (where ‘is at’ stands for ‘is at, in, on, for, with, about, along) (c) Possessive ‘x has a’

The distinct modes are identifying or ascriptive (Matthiessen 1995: 302). Halliday (1985: 119) uses ‘attributive’ rather than ‘ascriptive’, but the terms refer to the same. Identifying relations focus, as the name suggests, on identity: “x is identified by a” or “a serves to define the identity of x”. There are two sets of functional roles for the participants of identifying relational clauses. First of all, there are the roles of Identifier and Identified (Halliday 1985: 122). The Identifier is the entity which fixes the identity of the Identified, i.e. the Identified is identified by the Identifier. The other roles are Token and Value; the Token “stands in a relation of symbolic correlation to the second participant (the Value)” (Davidse 1996; cited in Harvey 2001: 384). The Token is an active participant, which is more concrete, while the Value is that which is represented, and is more abstract. Table 2 illustrates the roles in an identifying relation.

I am the villain Token Value Identified Identifier Table 2 Roles in an identifying relation (Halliday 1985: 125)

In the case of an attributive relation, there is a relation of classification rather than identification. An entity is said to be part of a class: A belongs to the category of B, or B is a characteristic of A (Halliday 1985: 120). Functional roles of the participants are Carrier, the entity that ‘carries’ the characteristic, i.e. which is categorized, and Attribute, the characteristic or category to which the Carrier belongs. The Attribute is more abstract, general since it is a category to which a more specific entity, the Carrier, belongs. The following example illustrates an attributive relation:

(20) [Carrier:] I [Process:] was [Attribute:] a college graduate. (Matthiessen 1995: 302).

As mentioned before, according to Matthiessen the expanding relational clauses sometimes have three instead of two participants e.g. He made her angry. In this case, the Attributive relation between her (Carrier) and angry (Attribute) was caused by an external element he: he caused her to be angry. This is what Matthiessen calls Assignment; the relation between the two elements of a relational clause is caused by an external Agent which is the Attributor in the case of an attributive relation or the Assigner in the case of an identifying relation (1995: 313). This is an important claim that could help prove lability in the domain of relational verbs. An alternation like She was angry – He made her angry resembles a labile alternation in at least some aspects, most importantly the switch in causativity, albeit without preservation of the verb form: it is a causative-inchoative alternation. However, what happens in principle, namely the addition of a cause, can be compared to what happens in the causative alternation of labile verbs: an Instigator is added to the process, allowing a causative sense of the event. Matthiessen further divides assignment into two types: expanding, including subtypes enhancing and elaborating, and projecting, consisting of subtypes verbal and mental. The following table provides examples of all possible types of assignment (1995: 318):

Ascriptive Identifying Expanding causation Enhancing (pure He made her angry He voted her the chair cause) Elaborating (semiotic / He named her Mary cause) Projecting causation Verbal He declared her guilty He declared her the winner Mental He thought her He thought her the intelligent leader Table 3 Types of assignment according to Matthiessen (1995: 318)

An important restriction is that assignment is only possible for intensive relational clauses according to Matthiessen, not for circumstantial or possessive relations (1995: 313). However, a verb like incorporate can be used as a relational process and establishes a circumstantial relationship. Example (21)b shows that a process like that can be assigned, even though it is not an intensive relation.

(21) a. The paper incorporates the new results (Levin 1993: 82) b. I incorporated the new results into the paper (ibid.)

Relational verbs establish a relation between two entities, in other words, they link two entities to each other; they are link verbs. The Collins COBUILD English Dictionary defines link verbs as connecting a Subject and a Complement (Sinclair 2000) which “describes the person or thing indicated by the Subject“ (Francis et al. 1996: 450). There are three main groups based on the meanings of link verbs: be, become and seem (ibid.). This suggests that they are often copula verbs and indeed, Greenbaum’s grammar (1991) considers copula verbs to be the only link verbs and they set up an intensive relation. However, others consider non-copula verbs to be relational and they can establish circumstantial and possessive relations as well. For example, Matthiessen considers indicate, suggest and travers to be relational verbs (1995: 305, 310). In other words, there is a broader definition of relational processes, including lexical verbs as well rather than only copula verbs.

In this paper, I will use the term relational verbs and processes rather than link verbs, in the sense of what Matthiessen calls ‘expanding relational clauses’. They establish a relation between two entities and therefore have at least two participants. They sometimes have the possibility to be assigned, meaning that an external agent is added to the process. Both attributive and identifying clauses will be considered, and intensive, circumstantial and possessive relations are part of relational processes, even though these subdivisions will not be made anymore in this paper. I will take the broader definition of relational verbs, including and even focussing on lexical verbs rather than copula verbs. Existential constructions, or existential relational clauses (Matthiessen 1995) are not a part of relational processes in this paper, because they are not characterised by the causative alternation that is crucial for labile verbs (Levin 1993: 249). This is illustrated in the following example:

(22) a. A solution to this problem exists. b. *The famous mathematician existed a solution to the problem

As already mentioned before, it can be argued that the phenomenon of lability is expanding towards the domain of relational processes. Francis et al. already suggest so when they point out a group of so- called ergative link verbs: form, keep, rank, rate, turn (1996: 477). Indeed, examples such as Her eyes turned green – Her contact lenses turned her eyes green confirm the idea. In my bachelor paper I tried to provide an overview of as many labile relational verbs as possible and I also tried to re-evaluate their characteristics with respect to those of prototypical labile verbs to see if there were any deviations (Lemeire 2017). In the following part I will summarize my findings, as they will be the basis for the research in this paper.

The main characteristic that will be the starting point and that always has to be present is a switch in causativity: the verbs allow a causative-inchoative alternation that makes it possible to construct an seemingly spontaneous event as an event that is caused by an external agent or the other way around. This can be illustrated by the following examples: (23) for material processes, (24) for relational processes. For (23)a and (24)a, there seem to be no direct causes for the events. It is as if they happened spontaneously, on their own. In (23)b and (24b), an Instigator is added to the events: these elements cause the events to take place.

(23) a. The vase broke. b. John broke the vase. (24) a. She turned bright red. b. A flush turned her bright red

The latter alternation (24) suggests the re-evaluation of another significant feature. A prototypical labile material verb has an alternation between an intransitive one-participant construction and a transitive two-participant construction. But the examples (24)a and (24b) clearly show an alternation between a clause with two elements and one with three elements, rather than one and two. However, this is only to be expected; a relational verb establishes a relation between two entities, meaning there are always two elements in the clause to start with. Adding an external Agent, either an Assigner or an Attributor, adds a third element which causes the relation to be established. Whether it is still an alternation between a transitive and an intransitive construction is also disputable. According to Francis et al. the constructions have the following patterns: Verb + Prepositional Object; Verb + Object + Prepositional Object (1996: 492). This way of analysing suggests that there is at least one Object in each construction, meaning there is no true intransitive construction. However the concept of Object is not always relevant in the case of relational verbs from a Functional perspective. The second part is either the Identity or in the case of (24) an Attribute. Davidse claims the following about the latter: “the Attribute, whether realized by adjective, prepositional phrase, ‘bare’ noun or nominal group, is not a participant” (1992a: 101). Moreover, if it really were an Object, it would correspond with the Subject of the passive

19 construction, which is clearly not the case: *Bright red is turned. In short, there is no consensus about the status of the second part of such a relational process and it is therefore not very clear whether there is still an alternation between a transitive and an intransitive construction. I will leave this in the middle for now, since that is not the focus of this paper and it would lead too far. The most important finding to keep in mind is that labile relational verbs usually have an alternation between a two- and a three-place construction, rather than a one- and a two-participant construction.

However, the latter finding is not always the case. Taking the verb interconnect for example; this does indeed allow an alternation between a two-place construction (25)a and a three-place construction (25)b. Besides this alternation, the verb can also be used in an alternation between a transitive two-participant construction and an intransitive one-participant construction, i.e. in a more prototypical labile alternation. This is illustrated by example (26). In that case, the two (or more) parts of the relational process are merged into one: one piece and the other are merged into the pieces, i.e. there is argument reduction. The verb however still establishes a relation between the entities.

(25) a. One piece interconnects with the other b. Harriet interconnected one piece with the other. (26) a. The pieces interconnected b. Harriet interconnect the pieces.

A last important characteristic is correspondence between the intransitive Subject and the transitive Object. As already mentioned before, the concept of Object is not always relevant in the case of relational processes when it comes to the second part of the process. However for this characteristic, it is all about the first part to the being. For example, The prince in (27) is the first part of the process. In the inchoative construction (27)a, it is the Subject, in the causative construction (27)b it can be considered the ‘Object’; it corresponds with the Subject of a passive construction The prince was changed into a frog.

(27) a. The prince changed into a frog. (Francis et al. 1996: 492) b. The magician changed the prince into a frog. (ibid.)

This criterion is not always conformed to; there are relational verbs that can occur in a causative- inchoative alternation, but that have a slightly different pattern. An example of such a verb is fill in (28). The verb is used to establish a circumstantial relation between water and the pail: water is in the pail. The first part of the process is the Subject of the inchoative construction (28)a, but it does not correspond to the ‘Object’ of the causative construction (28)b. In the latter construction, it is the second part of the process, the pail, that can be considered the Object (The pail was filled with water). Water on the other hand is what Levin calls the locatum argument: “the entity whose location is described by that verb” (1993: 81). Therefore, this alternation is called the Locatum Subject Alternation. Although it is a lot less prototypical and it deviated from this last characteristic, it is still interesting because it allows a kind of

20 causative-inchoative alternation with a verb used to express a relational process. Same goes for Location Subject Alternation. Those constructions “are used with location subjects to describe the capacity of the location with respect to the action named by the verb” (ibid.). (29) illustrates Location Subject Alternations. Levin provides a list of verbs that occur in these alternations: fill-verbs for the first, fit-verbs for the latter (1993). Abstract Cause Subject Alternations have similar patterns (ibid.).

(28) a. Water filled the pail (Levin 1993: 81) b. I filled the pail with water (ibid.)

(29) a. We sleep five people in each room (ibid.) b. Each room sleeps five people (ibid.)

Considering the re-evaluation of the characteristics, it can be noted that it is difficult or even impossible to define labile relational verbs as a clearly defined subgroup of labile verbs. Therefore I placed the types of relational verbs that have a causative-inchoative alternation on a continuum (Lemeire 2017): some types are more prototypical, others are less prototypical and deviate from one or more characteristics. The most prototypical ones are those with argument reduction, like The pieces interconnect – Harriet interconnect the pieces. It is an alternation between a transitive and an intransitive construction, a one- and a two-participant construction and there is Subject-Object correspondence. Then there are the general labile alternations with relational verbs, such as Her eyes turned green – Her contact lenses turned her eyes green. There is still Subject-Object correspondence but the number of ‘participants’ or elements in the clauses is different, since there are at least two elements to start with in the case of relational processes. Then least prototypical are verbs with alternations like Locatum Subject alternation, Location Subject alternation and Abstract Cause Subject Alternations. They are relevant because they are relational verbs that allow a causative-inchoative alternation, but they deviate from two characteristics: first of all the number of participants, which is to be expected, and secondly Subject- Object correspondence.

A last part to be discussed is the alternation itself and how it is construed. Haspelmath (1993) distinguished between different types of the causative-inchoative construction that are based on the direction of derivation: which verb is derived from which. Table 4 gives a quick overview and examples of the types. The most important difference is between asymmetrical, equipollent and suppletive alternations on the one hand and labile alternations on the other. While the labile alternation shows no change in verb form, equipollent and suppletive alternations have a clear change in form. The latter alternation uses two completely different verbs, while the first one has a vowel change. The example of the asymmetrical alternation uses the same verb form, but it is used as a reflexive verb, taking a reflexive pronoun.

Asymmetrical alternation John opent de deur De deur opent zich Equipollent alternation John fells the tree The tree falls Suppletive alternation John kills the victim The victim dies Labile alternation John broke the vase The vase broke Table 4 Overview of alternations according to Haspelmath (1993)

Most labile relational verbs have a labile alternation, for example She turned bright red – A flush turned her bright red, Her hopes proves wrong – He proves her hopes wrong. However the whole picture is a bit more complex. Take for example the verb match in (30). The causative construction (30)a takes a preposition with introducing the second part of the relational process while the same preposition is possible but not obligatory in the inchoative construction (30)b-c.

(30) a. Don’t match a blue shirt with a grey skirt. b. This blue shirt doesn’t match the grey skirt. c. This blue shirt doesn’t match with the grey skirt

Sometimes the prepositions are obligatory in both constructions (31). It is also possible that two different prepositions can be used in the same construction pair (32). A special case is when different prepositions are used with the same verbs, in different sentences (33)-(34): in the case of a different semantic ‘direction’, another preposition is needed.

(31) We divide into pairs. They divide us into pairs. (32) The fear of savage ‘folly’ links with/to the fear of God. Researchers link the fear of savage ‘folly’ with/to the fear of God. (33) The gardener grew that acorn into an oak tree. (Levin 1993: 174) That acorn grew into an oak tree. (ibid.) (34) The gardener grew an oak tree from that acorn. (ibid.) An oak tree grew from that acorn. (ibid.)

In the less prototypical cases of the causative-inchoative alternation, the following pattern can be found: the inchoative construction does not allow any preposition, in the causative construction, a preposition is obligatory, introducing the location subject, locatum subject or the abstract cause subject. (34) illustrates the pattern of a Location Subject Alternation:

(35) Each room sleeps five people. (Levin 1993: 82) We sleep five people in each room. (ibid.)

The following table provides an overview of the labile relational verbs discovered thus far (Lemeire 2017). It is subdivided on the basis of two features. First of all the verb’s position on the continuum from more to less prototypical, secondly whether or not the alternation allows and/or requires a preposition:

Patterns with General labile Patterns of locatum argument reduction relational patterns subject alternation Simple Interconnect, form, Rank, rate, turn, prove separate, merge, amalgamate, disconnect Preposition in both Identify, turn, change, constructions keep, equate, square, link, compare, form, match, match up, divide, subdivide, separate, disconnect, merge, amalgamate, interconnect, part, differentiate, alternate, conjoin, contrast, correlate, intertwine relate, associate, stand, dangle, hang, lay, lean, rest, sit, pour, dribble, drip, slop, spill, grow, develop, evolve, hatch, mature, fit, sleep Additional preposition Equate, match, form Fill (and other fill verbs), in causative fit (and other fit verbs), construction establish (and others), separate, indicate, express, display, demonstrate, depict, convey, reveal, include, incorporate, integrate Table 5 Overview of labile relational verbs (Lemeire 2017)

2.2. Ergativity in Dutch

Dutch has proven to make use of some specific strategies when it comes to the translation of English labile verbs. As the example below illustrates, Dutch also has verbs that are labile. Veranderen (to change) can occur in both a two-participant causative construction (36)a and a one-participant inchoative construction (36)b. The choice for a Dutch labile verb would be a good and straightforward translation strategy. However, studies often focus on other strategies, such as reflexive verbs, periphrastic constructions using doen/laten and verbs with prefix ver- that are very often used in Dutch. These strategies will be discussed in this paragraph.

(36) a. Ik verander mijn interieur elke zondag. OpenSoNaR b. Maar de mentaliteit verandert. OpenSoNaR

2.2.1. Periphrastic constructions

In Dutch, periphrastic constructions can be used to express causation. These constructions make use of the verbs doen and laten. They are used in a causative sense when followed by “bare infinitival complements, i.e. complements lacking the infinitival marker te (to)” (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997: 62). The Subject of these causative verbs is the ‘causer’ of the process that is denoted by the bare infinitive that follows. According to Verhagen & Kemmer, there are two dimensions that can be identified in causative events, “the distinction between initiator and endpoint of the causal change” and “the distinction between animate and inanimate” (1997: 71). Most important when it comes to the distinction of doen and laten as causative verbs is the latter dimension: laten occurs generally more frequent with an inanimate causer (Verhagen 1998: 63). This might be attributed to the fact that laten implies indirect causation, while doen indicates direct causation (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997). The two constructions can be illustrated by the following examples:

(37) Hij haalde de stop eruit en liet het badwater weglopen. he took the plug out and let the bath-water run-away (He took out the plug and let the bathwater flow off.) (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997: 68, (14))

(38) De stralende zon doet de temperatuur oplopen. the shining sun does the temperature rise (The bright sun makes the temperature rise.) (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997: 70, (1))

The first example (37) with laten is to be analyzed as indirect causation: the true direct cause in that case is gravity, a larger source of energy (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997: 68) while hij (he) pulling the plug is only an indirect cause. Indirect causation can be characterized as “a situation that is conceptualized in such a way that it is recognized that some other force besides the initiator is the most immediate

24 source of energy in the effected event” (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997: 67). They see it as an extension of “enablement” and “permission”. Example (38) on the other hand shows that the sun (inanimate) is the direct cause of the rising of the temperature.

2.2.2. Verbs with prefix ver-

For this translation strategy, research has been carried out by Van de Beld (2010) among others. Van de Beld investigates the relation between ver-verbs in Dutch and unaccusativity from the perspective of Government and Binding. A distinction can be made between expletivization and causitivization. The former term refers to the reduction that occurs in a labile alternation such as John opens the door – the door opens. It means that the external role is reduced (Van de Beld 2010: 27). The latter refers to the process in which an argument is added. According to Reinhart (2002), the added role is an Agent. Ver- verbs are verbs that “involve the movement or transition to a new location or state of the object of the verb” (Van de Beld 2010: 18). In general, such verbs can have three meanings which allow them to be categorized into three types (Van de Beld 2010: 43):

1. BECOME-type: the internal role becomes that what is denoted by the stem. 2. GO-type: the internal role goes away (possibly metaphorically) through means denoted denoted by the stem. 3. MIS-type: the internal role is negatively affected by the action denoted by the stem.

In the light if this dissertation, which focusses on relational verbs, it might be expected that the BECOME- type is most relevant. It emerges without exceptions only when the prefix is added to adjectives or nouns. The attachment of prefix ver- to an adjective is productive however only a limited set of verbs is suitable for the attachment. That is because ver-verbs can only be derived from adjectives that are gradable because it “must have a commonly used comparative (Van de Beld 2010: 48). A last thing worth mentioning is that prefix ver- is an exception in the sense that it alters the word class of the word it is attached to. Usually, prefixes do not do that. The prefix has a transitivizing effect in both Dutch and German (Van de Beld 2012: 177).

Ver-verbs have also been discussed by Los et al. (2012). From a comparative perspective, Los et al. argue that the prefix ver-, amongst other inseparable prefixes like ont- and be- are “grammaticalized into bound morphemes because Verb Second (V2) was not yet in place so that they were always immediately adjacent to the verb” (2012: 176). They are derived from morphemes that were free in earlier Germanic. In English, these prefixes have been lost in the transition from Old to Middle English because the unstressed syllables were often reduced (ibid.). With respect to one of the semantic diagnostics that has already been discussed, namely telicity, ver-verbs are telic verbs , i.e. the action denoted by the verb is bounded by time.

2.2.3. Reflexives

Research has shown that languages like German, French and Dutch have causative-inchoatve alternations in which the inchoative construction contains a reflexive verb (Reinhart & Siloni 2004, Kallulli 2006, Steinbach 2004). This is illustrated by the following examples, that take a reflexive pronoun:

(39) Jan opent de deur. De deur opent zich. (40) Jan biegt den Stock. Der Stock biegt sich. (41) Jean casse la branche. La branche se casse.

Research also shows that there is similar morphological marking for reflexive and unaccusative verbs from a cross-linguistic perspective (Reinhart & Siloni 2004, Kallulli 2006). That is probably due to the fact that they imply the reduction of an element that is present in the transitive construction. Whether or not reflexives can and should be analyzed as unaccusatives is much discussed, specifically in the Formal tradition of Government and Binding (Reinhart & Siloni 2004). They discuss all types of reflexives, also types that do not participate in ergative alternations. Steinbach (2004: 318) makes a distinction between three types of reflexives for German which are all taken into consideration in the aforementioned discussion. These can be illustrated by examples (42)-(44). For this dissertation however it is the anticausative reflexive that will be focused on. To investigate whether these really are unaccusative verbs is not within the scope of this paper. The use of a reflexive pronoun will be considered a process used in Dutch to construe an inchoative sense.

(42) Die Tür öffnet sich. = anticausative (43) Das Buch liest sich leicht. = middle (44) Peter rasiert sich. = reflexive

Compared to Dutch, the situation is completely different in English when it comes to reflexives. Steinbach claims that “transitive reflexive sentences in English always get a reflexive interpretation” (2004: 319). When applied to Steinbach’s distinction, it would lead to the following interpretation: the anticausative and middle construction do not have a reflexive pronoun, or they have what Steinbach would call a morphologically empty reflexive pronoun (2004: 325). The reflexive sentence in (45) on the other hand is always interpreted reflexive and even when there is no reflexive pronoun, it can still be interpreted as reflexive.

(45) He shaves / He shaves himself. = reflexive (46) The door opens. = anticausative (47) The book reads easily. = middle

The following examples illustrate the difference between Dutch and English when it comes to anticausative (inchoative) reflexivity. They specifically come from the dataset that will be used in this research, i.e. using labile relational verbs that occur in combination with a preposition. English has a labile alternation in which the verb form does not change; the Dutch inchoative equivalent has a reflexive pronoun.

Causative: (48)a. That is responsibility enough to make b. Dat is reden genoeg om ze hier als centraal us develop them into a central instrument here. instrument te ontwikkelen.

Inchoative: (49)a. Applicant countries must develop b. De kandidaat-landen moeten zich into democratic constitutional states. ontwikkelen tot democratische rechtsstaten.

However, the reflexivity in the inchoative pattern is not always unambiguous. Sometimes the reflexive pronoun in the inchoative construction is possible but not obligatory. That can be illustrated by (50)-(51):

Causative: (50) De rivier de Berkel splitst de buurschap in twee delen. OpenSoNaR

Inchoative: (51) a. De rest van het bedrijf splitst zich in tweeën. OpenSoNaR b. De groep splitst in veel kleine groepjes. OpenSoNaR

A relevant example that Van de Beld provides concerns the verb veranderen (‘to change’). As already mentioned, verbs of change make up a large part of labile verbs. However in the light of optional reflexivity, Van de Beld indicates that it is not clear whether veranderen can occur with a reflexive pronoun (illustrated by (52)). When looking up the combination of veranderen and zich in OpenSoNaR, it seems that it is not impossible but it does not occur frequently either. This shows that in certain constructions and senses, it is possible to use veranderen reflexive ((53)-(54)), however it is rather exceptional.

(52) a. Het landschap veranderde. The landscape changed. ‘The landscape has changed.’ b. ?Het landschap veranderde zich. The landscape changed SE. ‘The landscape has changed.’

(53) Zij verandert zich in een prachtige vrouw OpenSoNaR (54) Maar hij verandert zich snel in een vreselijk nijlpaard OpenSoNaR

Another relevant study with respect to reflexivity and lability is carried out by De Vries (2000). His study compares French, Dutch and the Dutch dialect Heerlens. On the basis of ten ergativity tests, he examines whether a set of reflexive verbs in the three languages is labile or not. His conclusion is that, according to the diffuse results, reflexive verbs cannot be considered labile (De Vries 2010: 9). However, they are not just a subgroup of transitive verbs either. In other words they need to be classified in a different way. In order to do so correctly, additional research has to be done. De Vries’ results align with the claim of Reinhart & Siloni that “reflexives systematically fail syntactic tests of unaccusativity” (2004: 10). However, some do believe that labile verbs are very closely related to reflexive verbs, since they both do not take an accusative object (Abraham 1986: 1).

Research similar to that of De Vries is done by Cornips & Hulk (1996), who also try to find a way to classify reflexive verbs. Their research is based on the same three languages, Dutch, the Dutch dialect Heerlens and French. Interesting in their research is that they start from a specific set of verbs, namely ones that have two constructions in the inchoative sense in the Dutch dialect Heerlens: one is a reflexive construction (56)a, the other one not (56)b. However, in contrast to De Vries, Cornips & Hulk support the idea that these reflexives in Heerlens should be analysed as unaccusatives. The reflexive pronoun in (56)a functions as “an aspectual marker, namely that of focusing on the end-point of the action” (Cornips & Hulk 1996: 2).

(55) causative construction Ik buig het riet. ‘I bend the reed’ (56) inchoative constructions a. HD/?*SD Het riet buigt zich. the reed bends refl ‘the reed is bending’ b. HD/SD Het riet buigt. The reed bends ‘the reed is bending’ (Cornips & Hulk 1996: 1, 1)

In order to support their claim, they show that reflexive verbs of change of state and reflexive transitive verbs are very different when it comes to the distribution of the one-participant construction (Cornips & Hulk 1996: 2). The regular embedded reflexive construction, that takes the causative laten, is grammatical when using default reflexives, but it is ungrammatical for change of state verbs that are reflexive. According to Everaert (1986: 89, as cited in Cornips & Hulk 1996: 4), the latter has to do with the fact that “het riet (the reed) is not an agentive external argument which is required by the causative laten” (Cornips & Hulk 1996: 4).

(57) SD/HD Moeder laat de kinderen zich wassen. Mother lets the children refl wash (58) SD/HD *Moeder laat het riet zich buigen. mother lets the reed refl bend (Cornips & Hulk 1996: 4, (10)a.-b.)

2.3. Contrastive research

A previous contrastive study of labile verbs in English and Dutch has been carried out by De Groote, who investigates the equivalents of a set of “deadjectival ergativec verbs ending in the suffix -en” (2013: 10). Her dataset shows certain translation strategies that are used in Dutch. First of all there are a number of prefixed verbs, of which ver-verbs are the most frequent. While van de Beld claims that ver- verbs derived from adjectives are rare, a lot of ver-verbs in De Groote’s research are derived from adjectives. Only one verb is not (2010: 53). A second strategy is attributive constructions. In these constructions, a verb is combined with an adjective. This strategy is the most used one in the research of De Groote. The third strategy is ergative verbs which make up 12% of her dataset. De Groote notices that of all ergative verbs, 75% is a ver-verb (2010: 56). The fourth category is deadjectival verbs, however this is only a small set. The next strategy is reflexive verbs. These occur mostly in the intransitive constructions of her research. Lastly there are periphrastic constructions using either doen, laten or that are construed in another way (2010: 58). Figure 5 shows the quantitative distribution of the strategies used in Dutch. De Groote opted for “a descriptive analysis of language data rather than the user data, focusing on dictionary data in a quantitative approach” (2010: 44). Also, she gathered her set of deadjectival labile verbs on the basis of the Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns (Francis et al. 1996) and a study carried out by Van Gelderen, ‘Valency changes in the history of English’ (2011).

Figure 5 Representation of Dutch translations (De Groote 2013: 50)

3. Methodology

The aim of this research is to investigate how labile relational verbs in English are translated into Dutch, or how the relation between the two elements of a relational process (using a labile verb) is transferred into Dutch. In order to do so, I will opt for a qualitative approach using user data (rather than dictionary data). First of all, it is important to narrow down the list of labile relational verbs to a manageable, coherent set of verbs that can be analyzed in a corpus study. The subdivision in Lemeire (2017) already shows that the labile relational verbs can be divided on the basis of either construction patterns or the use of prepositions. Both of these elements could be used as criteria to compose a set of verbs for research. For example, research could be done on verbs that construe alternations with argument reduction, or on verbs that occur in the locatum or location subject alternation. However for this research, I will focus on the use of prepositions, more specifically I will use the verbs that take a preposition in both the causative and the inchoative construction as the subject of this research. Nevertheless, this is only a criterium to compose a coherent set of verbs, the use of prepositions in the English constructions and their Dutch equivalents will not be the focus of this research.

Choosing the criterium of prepositions in both constructions however immediately implies a choice for a certain type of construction as well, namely what has been defined as the general labile relational pattern (Lemeire 2017: 36). As already suggested in Lemeire (2017), relational verbs can be found on a continuum from more to less prototypically labile. A lot of verbs that take a preposition only in the causative construction are less prototypical because there is often no correspondence between the Subject of the inchoative construction and the Object of the causative construction. Therefore they can be considered peripheral. Their peripheral status would also be interesting to investigate, however that can be the subject of another research. Examples of such verbs are fill and other fill verbs (Levin 1993: 81), fit and other fit verbs, establish and others. In these cases, the preposition seems to be less closely related to the verb (because the prepositions are not needed in the inchoative construction). Also, the constituent introduced by the preposition can sometimes be left out (59)c.

(59) a. Water filled the pail. b. I filled the pail with water. c. I filled the pail.

In short, verbs that have prepositions in both construction of the alternations and that consequently occur in the general labile relational pattern are the subject of this paper. The verbs that meet these criteria are the following, and they occur in the alternation patterns illustrated by (60):

Identify, turn, change, keep, equate, square, link, compare, form, match, match up, divide, subdivide, separate, disconnect, merge, amalgamate, interconnect, part, differentiate, alternate, conjoin, contrast, correlate, intertwine relate, associate, stand, dangle, hang, lay, lean, rest, sit, pour, dribble, drip, slop, spill, grow, develop, evolve, hatch, mature, fit, sleep

(60) a. The prince changed into a frog. (Francis et al. 1996: 492) b. The magician changed the prince into a frog. (ibid.)

The corpus used for this study is the parallel corpus Europarl. It is a corpus that is derived from proceedings in the European Parliament and provides sentence aligned text which is very useful for comparison of languages and also machine translation systems (Koehn 2005). The Europarl corpus and search interface are provided via the website Opus, which also provides other interfaces and corpora such as a corpus of subtitles. For this paper, the Europarl V7 corpus was chosen because it contains bureaucratic language. That is interesting for two reasons. The first one is provided by Harvey:

“Relational clauses, both identifying and attributive, are quite common in formal written registers of English, e.g. in technical, scientific, academic and bureaucratic texts (Halliday & Martin 1993; Lemke 1990a; Wignell et al. 1993); in fact, the proliferation of these clauses is one of the indexical features of formal registers” (2001: 380).

Even though the Europarl corpus is not a corpus of originally written language, it is still rather formal language and it is bureaucratic. Therefore a corpus like this is interesting for research of relational processes. Secondly, labile verbs provide the possibility to hide the agency of the process, which is often profited from in bureaucratic language (Stubbs 1994). Also Davidse has pointed out that “Keyser and Roeper (1984: 390) have drawn attention to the recent productivity of the ergative principle in scientific and bureaucratic English” (1999: 116). For this exact reason it seemed more fit to opt for the Europarl corpus rather than for example the OpenSubtitles corpus since subtitles cover a different, broader type of language than bureaucratic language. A corpus study of scientific language would also have been interesting for this research (since natural processes are often construed as inchoative events, using labile verbs), but I opted for the Europarl corpus for reasons of efficiency and availability. This corpus also offers an extra angle of approach, namely language and translation practice and spoken discourse. Instead of just investigating whether the Dutch counterpart of a labile relational verb in English is also labile (by for example comparing dictionaries), it offers a look into how the verbs are used in action.

In the queries of the Europarl V7 search interface I made sure all conjugations of the verbs were included and that there was optional space for an element between the verb and the preposition, which is important for the causative construction. An example of such a query, for the verb turn, looks like this:

[(word=“turn(s|ed|ing)?”) & (pos=”V.*”)] []? “into” 1

1 A note must be made with respect to the queries that were used. The optional space that is provided by a query like this allows only one element. A better query would have allowed two or even three elements in between the verb and the preposition, so that there were more possibilities. Unfortunately, this only came to my attention in the final stage of my dissertation, which made it impossible to change the query and with that the whole dataset and my findings on time. 32

Running the queries in the corpus for all the verbs yielded the following number of hits: Verb number of hits Hatch from + into 0 Conjoin with 0 Dribble onto 0 Drip onto 0 Slop onto 0 Dangle on 0 Amalgamate with + into 1 Part from 3 Affliliate with 4 Spill on 4 Pour onto 4 Mature from + into 7 Alternate with 9 Form into 12 Keep off 12 Lean on 12 Sleep in 14 Interconnect with 15 Intertwine with 15 Evolve from 23 Correlate with 25 Differentiate into + from 30 Square with 37 Hang on 42 Evolve into 45 Disconnect from 45 Match with 50 Merge with + into 50 Contrast with 52 Change into 98 Grow into + from 127 Lay on 127 equate with + to 147 Rest on 152 Divide into 290 Identify with 297 Stand on 302 Sit on 322

Develop into + from 433 Separate from 482 Turn into 1437 Associate with 2216 Compare with + to 2707 Link with + to 3470 Relate to 14834 Table 6 Number of hits in the Europarl V7 corpus.

In order to narrow down the list of verbs even more and to have sufficient hits for all the verbs that are to be investigated, a minimum required number of hits will be used. All verbs above the red line do not have enough hits and will therefore not be used in the data set. All other verbs, yielding 200 or more hits will be used. That leaves 11 labile relational verbs. However, for two verbs (stand on and sit on) more consideration is needed before using them in this research. The 20 hits on the first page of each of the query results show that it is difficult to find uses of those verbs that correspond with the sense of a labile relational verb. This can be illustrated by the following examples from the first 20 matches for each verb; their meaning is quite different from that of the verb used in a labile alternation The books stood on the table - Cheryl stood the books on the table (Levin 1993: 112). For this reason, I chose to leave out stand on and sit on in this research.

(61) Let me set out where matters now stand on these negotiations […]. (62) […] the European Parliament will stand firm on public health. (63) […] then there is a court to sit on litigation. (64) I sat on the Conciliation Committee with David Bowe at the time.

The final dataset consists of 9 verbs. For each verb, the first 200 matches from the Europarl corpus are used (unsorted). If the verb allows two prepositions, then 100 hits per preposition are used, so that there are still 200 hits per verb. During the processing of the data, a lot of hits were invalid. That was the case when for example the verb was actually used as a noun (which did happen sometimes, even though the query only asked for verbs), when the Dutch counterpart did not align with the original text, when the Dutch counterpart was too deviating in the sense that it did in no way establish any relation anymore at all etc. The invalid hits were then removed, after which the dataset had to be filled with new hits in order to maintain the amount of hits. In the end, the dataset consists of 1800 hits in total which should be sufficient for an introductory descriptive comparison of the verbs in English and their Dutch counterparts.

4. Corpus Research

In this chapter, each of the verbs will first be examined in their dataset separately. In order to accurately describe the equivalents in Dutch of the English verbs, the starting point will always be the online Collins COBUILD Dictionary (CCD), which describes how the English verbs behave and which patterns are possible. The next step will be to see which verb(s) the Dutch online dictionary Vandale provides as equivalents for the English labile verbs. Then the data sets will be examined and compared to the equivalents of Vandale. This will allow to see whether the practice reflects the theory in Vandale and also whether labile relational verbs in English have labile relational equivalents in Dutch. If not, it will give an indication of the possible mechanisms that establish the relation between the two parts of the relational process. The findings will be illustrated by examples that come from the dataset from the Europarl V7 corpus (which can be found in the appendix), unless stated otherwise. After the analysis of the separate verbs, the chapter will be concluded by a discussion of tendencies that can be found throughout and that give an indication of how relational processes in general are construed in Dutch, compared to English.

4.1. Analysis

4.1.1. Identify

The CCD confirms the lability of the verb identify through the following explanations (amongst others): “If you identify with someone or something, you feel that you understand them or their feelings and ideas”, “If you identify one person or thing with another, you think that they are closely associated or involved in some way”. The former would be the inchoative use, the latter one causative.

Vandale translates identify as follows:

Identify (intransitive) 1.(+ with) zich identificeren (met), zich vereenzelvigen (met) Identify (transitive) 1. identificeren, de identiteit vaststellen van, in verband brengen: I can't identify your accent ik kan uw accent niet thuisbrengen; s.o. who is identified with a fascist party iem. die in verband gebracht wordt met een fascistische partij 2. erkennen, vaststellen

The dataset in general supports this: identify is translated as (zich) identificeren and zich vereenzelvigen multiple times. In verband brengen is used only once. Many other verbs are use as well, most of which are reflexive: herkennen in and vinden in are used most frequently. All occurrences of herkennen in have a reflexive pronoun. This can be illustrated by example (65). The same goes for vinden in.

(65) We can identify well with the final version. Wij herkennen ons goed in de uiteindelijke versie.

The fact that verbs are reflexive in an inchoative sense is not uncommon since, as already mentioned, that is a strategy that is often used in Dutch. It allows verbs like identificeren, vereenzelvigen, associëren and herkennen to construe causative-inchoative alternations that are asymmetrical, not labile (Haspelmath 1993). However, vinden behaves differently: a causative counterpart (66)b is rather problematic:

(66) a. Ik kan me volledig vinden in het perspectief […] b. ?Hij kan mij vinden in het perspectief […]

While the majority of the translations in the data set is reflexive, there is also a significant part that is not used reflexive e.g. gelijkstellen, confronteren, aanspreken, krijgen, hebben, samenvallen, kampen. An example of such a verb is the following:

(67) […] if European citizens are to identify with the […] om de Europese burgers achter het process that we are carrying forward. huidig opbouwproces te krijgen.

Besides verbs, the dataset shows that nouns and expressions are also used as counterparts for identify. The nouns are mostly from the same semantic field as the verb identificeren. An example is (68). The use of an expression can be illustrated by (69).

(68) The day on which the elections are held is also Ook de dag waarop gestemd wordt, is extremely important in connection with identifying uiterst belangrijk voor identificatie met with the European project. het Europese project. (69) Today, you are identifying Yugoslavia U gooit echter Joegoslavië op een hoop with Milosevic met Milosevic.

There is one interesting expression used in the dataset (70). It takes the verb vinden which has been discussed before as a verb (in combination with in) taking a reflexive pronoun. However (70) it is not reflexive and does not take a preposition. That was only possible because the translation is rather a paraphrase than a truthful translation. What makes the example even more interesting is the use of doen, which has been discussed as expressing causation. This is an example of a periphrastic construction.

(70) […] to find ways of helping our young people […] manieren te vinden om de jeugd van to identify with European ideals Europa zijn plaats in de maatschappij te doen vinden.

4.1.2. Turn

The CCD says the following about the verb turn in combination with the preposition into: “To turn or be turned into something means to become that thing”. The relational nature can hardly be denied: its core meaning is ‘become’. Moreover, the CCD labels it as what they call a link verb, in combination with adjectives, colour and changes in weather. The given definition also suggests the labile nature of it. In a very specific context, it is even labile in its original, narrow definition, allowing an alternation between a one- and a two-participant construction: “In sports, if a game turns, or is turned, something significant happens which changes the way the game is developing”. The latter use however does not take a preposition.

According to Vandale, turn in combination with into corresponds to the following verbs in Dutch: veranderen in, (ver)maken tot, omzetten in. These equivalents are indeed reoccurring verbs in the dataset and can be illustrated by the following examples:

(71) In 1979 it was turned into a disguised Dit is in 1979 veranderd in een verdekte declaration. vermelding.

(72) These are ways in which we can turn into a Dat zijn middelen die ons tot een tijger kunnen tiger. maken.

(73) It is turned into dioxins and also toxic ash. Het wordt omgezet in dioxinen en ook in giftige as.

Interesting is the use of the verb maken: in the majority of the cases it is not used in the construction maken tot. A more common construction is maken van i.e. in combination with a different preposition that introduces the first part of the relational process rather than the second part. In some cases, maken is even used without a preposition. However that is rather exceptional. These two other constructions using maken are illustrated in (74)-(75).

(74) No, what they have done is to turn Europe Zij hebben van Europa een nationalistische, into a bazaar at which nationalistic, national nationale belangensupermarkt gemaakt. interests are bartered. (75) In other words they are turning black Met andere woorden, zij maakt wit wat zwart into white. is.

Omzetten in itself occurs multiple times, but it can be noticed that it is often part of a Dutch expression, woorden omzetten in daden, which is the counterpart for the English to turn words into actions or deeds. However, the Dutch counterpart of that expression does not always use omzetten in: sometimes the verb is voegen bij or it is possible that no verb at all is used: in the latter case, a correlative construction is used instead. These can be illustrated by the following examples:

(76) What we have to do now is turn declarations Nu komt het erop aan om de daad bij het into deeds. woord te voegen.

(77) […] and turn words into action. […] niet alleen met woorden maar ook met daden.

A part of the translations is provided by copula verbs zijn and worden. These confirm the relational nature of the verb turn once more. Both verbs are non-labile and present an ’event’ that can be considered inchoative. While turn (and most of its counterparts) occurs with a preposition, zijn and worden do not. There is however one exception to that in the data for turn:

(78) […] which once again has turned into a trap. […] dat eens te meer tot een valstrik wordt.

The data show that it is possible to incorporate the second part of the relational process in the verb. In those cases there is no preposition, which is to be expected since the prepositions usually specify the link with the second part of the relational process. Since that element is now incorporated in the verb there is no need for a preposition. The data provide some clear examples of such a process (79)-(81). First of all, it can be noted that sometimes it is only a part of the second relational element that is incorporated in the verb, not the whole second element: it is only the meaning of the adjectives self- employed and lively (79)-(80) that is expressed in the verbs verzelfstandigen and leven. Secondly, the essential meaning of the verb turn into is not transferred into Dutch in the same way. In (79), the meaning to turn into or to become is achieved by the addition of the prefix ver-. As already mentioned, according to Van de Beld, the BECOME-type of ver-verbs has the essential meaning that “the internal role becomes that what is denoted by the stem” (Van de Beld 2010: 43). In this case, that would be, to become self-employed. In (80), the meaning of turn into is not found in the corresponding verb leven. It can be derived from meer gaan which implies a shift from less to more, in other words there is a change from one state to another. In (81), realiseren is a counterpart for turn into a reality as a whole.

(79) They, in fact, turned drivers into self- Zij hebben juist hun werknemers employed drivers. verzelfstandigd. (80) The plenary sittings must be turned into lively De voltallige vergaderingen moeten meer gaan occasions. leven. (81) Finally, I hope that we can all make sure that it Tot slot hoop ik dat wij er allemaal op kunnen is turned into a reality. toezien dat het gerealiseerd wordt.

Sometimes, expressions are used as a counterpart. However in (82), there is a clear difference in meaning. The Dutch counterpart has an additional meaning of pretending, which is not present in the original. Moreover, the essential meaning of the relational verb, to become, is kind of lost. That is because there are no two parts anymore between which doen alsof creates a relation.

(82) I am not turning this into a matter of Ik wil niet doen alsof onze nationale eer op national honour het spel staat

The meaning of turn into can also be expressed by a noun, which is often derived from the verbs in the dataset e.g. verandering (83) and omvorming (84). What can be noticed is that they take two prepositions each introducing one of the elements of the relation. The first preposition, introducing the element that corresponds to the starting point of the change is always van, the second preposition is different.

(83) The strategic goal […] is to turn itself Het strategische doel […] is de omvorming into the most dynamic knowledge-based van onze economie tot een op kennis economy in the world gebaseerde economie, tot de meest dynamische economie ter wereld.

(84) It is becoming increasingly clear Het wordt steeds duidelijker dat de that turning Europe into a fortress. verandering van Europa in een vesting.

One last thing worth mentioning is example (85). The verb functioneren is preceded by laten. Together they form a periphrastic construction that expresses indirect causation (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997).

(85) We must equally reject pressures to turn Wij mogen echter niet toegeven aan de them into thinly - or not so thinly - disguised druk om die controles als soms nauwelijks barriers to trade. verhulde handelsbarrières te laten functioneren.

4.1.3. Divide

“When people or things are divided or divide into smaller groups or parts, they become separated into smaller parts” is a definition that the CCD provides for the verb divide in combination with into. It immediately proves that it can be used in a causative and an inchoative sense.

Vandale translates divide into Dutch as follows:

Divide (intransitive) 1. verdeeld worden 2. onenigheid krijgen 3. zich delen, zich vertakken Divide (transitive) 1. delen, in delen splitsen, indelen 2. scheiden: divided highway weg met gescheiden dubbele rijbanen

3. onderling verdelen (ook figuurlijk), distribueren, verkavelen: divided against itself onderling verdeeld 4. delen: how much is 18 divided by 3? hoeveel is 18 gedeeld door 3?

As these translations already suggest, the main verb in Dutch, both for the causative and the inchoative use is delen. The majority of the data consists delen (86) and compound verbs made out of delen as a stem with several prefixes: indelen, opdelen, onderverdelen and most used of all, verdelen.

(86) […] if the world were divided into two in this […] als de wereld op deze manier in tweeën way. zou worden gedeeld.

As the equivalents provided by Vandale already suggest, delen is a verb that can occur in a causative and an inchoative sense. In the case of the latter, it occurs with a reflexive pronoun zich (87). The use of reflexive verbs in the inchoative part of the alternation is, as mentioned before, a reoccurring process in Dutch.

(87) The embryo, as it divides into two, then four, Een embryo deelt zich in tweeën, in vieren, in eight and sixteen and more cells, is the process of achten, en zo verder - dat is het levensproces. the living being.

Some verbs that behave in the same way and that are also suggested by Vandale are splitsen (88) and opsplitsen. While they only occur in a causative sense in the data, they can also be found in an inchoative sense. Examples (89)-(90) from the SoNaR corpus show that they also take a reflexive pronoun in that sense, but that is only optional. For delen verbs on the other hand, the reflexive pronoun seems obligatory: *Een embryo deelt in tweeën.

(88) The report relates to a Commission initiative Het verslag gaat over het initiatief van de which the Council divided into two some time Commissie, dat de Raad indertijd in tweeën heeft ago. gesplitst.

(89) De groep splitste zich in tweeën. OpenSoNaR (90) Het peloton splitste in drie stukken. OpenSoNaR

Besides these verbs that allow causative-inchoative alternations, there are some reoccurring verbs that construe only an inchoative construction, for example uiteenvallen in (91) and bestaan uit (92).

(91) […] the human race can be divided […] dat de mensheid uiteenvalt in twee into two classes. categorieën. (92) The agreement is divided into three parts. Het akkoord bestaat uit drie delen.

Some verbs on the other hand only construe causative constructions, for example samenvatten als in (93). However, some of those verbs construe a different pattern, namely one in which the first part of the relational process is introduced by a preposition rather than the second part. That is the case for aanbrengen in (94).

(93) Ladies and gentlemen, in my opinion, the Dames en heren, het debat kan mijns inziens discussion can, in principle, be divided into two worden samengevat als zijnde twee parallelle parallel lines . lijnen. (94) […] which will also be […] divided into three […] doordat er drie verschillende categorieën in bands. worden aangebracht.

As was also the case for the previous verbs, divide is sometimes translated as nouns or expressions. The nouns are also usually derived from verbs that are also used as translations for divide or for other labile relational verbs. (95) shows that a noun can construe a completely different pattern. First of all, the second part to the being, namely two camps, is integrated in the noun itself: tweedeling. Therefore there is no need for a preposition to introduce it. Secondly, there is a preposition preceding the first part to the being, van Europa. Example (96) on the other hand has a more typical pattern, with a preposition introducing the second part.

(95) Now that Europe is no longer militarily and Dankzij de opheffing van de militaire en politically divided into two camps, cooperation politieke tweedeling van Europa is de in the Baltic has gained in force. samenwerking in het Oostzeegebied geïntensiveerd. (96) […] we will become divided into those who […] we een scheiding krijgen tussen can afford to access information and those who degenen die geld hebben voor informatie en cannot. degenen die dat niet hebben.

The equivalents for divide also show another mechanism, i.e. the use of correlative constructions (97). This can be illustrated by the following example, in which determiners are used to construe the correlation. Linking adverbials can do the same.

(97) The delegations are divided into those which Sommige delegaties zijn echter veeleer want to keep the informality of this undertaking and voorstander van een informeel compromis, those which want the process to be enshrined in the terwijl andere delegaties erop staan dat deze Treaty. afspraak in het Verdrag wordt opgenomen.

4.1.4. Develop

For develop in combination with prepositions from and into, the CCD only provides examples that have an inchoative sense: These clashes could develop into open warfare and […] a problem which developed from a leg injury. However the verb on its own as a material verb can occur in both a causative

41 and an inchoative sense: She won a grant to develop her own business – […] the market will develop. That might hint at the labile nature of the verb and that is confirmed by Levin (1993: 174) and by the dataset, as the causative example (98) shows. The predominance of the inchoative use of develop into/from is however also confirmed in the data, since it occurs in an inchoative construction most of the time.

(98) That is responsibility enough to make us develop them into a central instrument shows.

According to Vandale, the Dutch equivalents of develop are the following:

Develop (intransitive) 1. ontwikkelen, uitwerken, ontginnen: developing country ontwikkelingsland; develop a film een film(pje) ontwikkelen 2. ontvouwen, uiteenzetten Develop (transitive and intransitive) 1. (zich) ontwikkelen, (doen) ontstaan, (doen) uitbreiden

The dataset proves that ontwikkelen is the most used equivalent. Also, once again, the use of a reflexive pronoun is the process to construe the inchoative construction. In the case of develop into, the preposition would match with tot according to the Dutch ‘Prisma van de Voorzetsels’ (Reinsma et al 1997). Develop from would correspond with ontwikkelen uit. However they can be considered complementary: it is possible to use either one of the constructions in the same sentence while still maintaining the same meaning. The only difference is the placement of the prepositions and whether the focus is on the starting point or the end point of the change. For example in (99), one would expect Y ontwikkelt zich tot Z rather than Z ontwikkelt zich uit Y but both are perfectly possible. The two constructions can also be combined in one sentence, with van instead of in which is illustrated by example (100).

(99) […] how we create the conditions in which […] hoe we omstandigheden scheppen waarin cultural identities can develop into shared political zich uit deze heterogene culturele identiteit een identities. gemeenschappelijk politieke identiteit […] kunnen ontwikkelen. (100) […] the European Free Alliance which […] de Europese Vrije Alliantie die zich van een has developed from humble foundations in 1981 bescheiden stichting in 1981 ontwikkeld heeft in into an association […] een organisatie […]

Even though the focus of this paper is not on the prepositions, I would still like to mention very shortly that the data show quite deviating prepositions from what is expected: ontwikkelen can occur with a broad variety of prepositions rather than only the two suggested by the dictionary of prepositions. Such a deviation can be illustrated by (101):

(101) If Palestine is developed into what the Als Palestina zich ontwikkelt in de richting die de Palestinian author Edward Said has said that Palestijnse Edward Saïd zegt te vrezen […]. he fears.

The dataset also provides a range of other possible verbs. Some of those seem to behave in the same way as ontwikkelen, for example veranderen and omvormen in the sense that they can construe a causative-inchoative alternation. There is also a series of verbs that are used specifically for either a causative or an inchoative construction. In the set of verbs establishing inchoative constructions, once again the copula verbs worden and zijn can be found. Interesting is that while they usually do not take a preposition, worden can be found a few times on combination with one, which can be illustrated by example (102).

(102) […] to destroy the embryo […] om het embryo te vernietigen dat de vrucht which develops from the substitution of the wordt van de overplaatsing van de celkern. cell nucleus.

Once again, nouns derived from previously mentioned verbs are also a mechanism used to establish a relational process and as an equivalent of labile relational verbs. Most of them are derived from ontwikkelen (103), which is to be expected since it is the most used verb in the data set. Expressions are barely used.

(103) […] because Europe has set extremely Europa heeft zichzelf namelijk uitzonderlijk ambitious aims for itself to develop into a ambitieuze doelstellingen opgelegd - de society with low carbon emissions. ontwikkeling naar een maatschappij met een lage koolstofuitstoot.

4.1.5. Separate

“If you separate people or things that have been connected, or if one separates from another, the connection between them is ended”, is the definition provided by the CCD for separate on its own. It already suggests that there are two alternating patterns. That is also confirmed in the case of separate combined with from; the CCD provides the two patterns needed for a causative-inchoative alternation, with the following examples: They want to separate teaching from research - Catalan parties vowing to separate from Spain.

Vandale gives the following equivalents:

Separate (intransitive) 1. zich (van elkaar) afscheiden, zich afzonderen, zich verdelen, uiteenvallen: separate from zich afscheiden van 2. scheiden, uit elkaar gaan

Separate (transitive) 1. afzonderen, losmaken, verdelen: legally separated gescheiden van tafel en bed; widely separated ver uit elkaar gelegen

Scheiden and other scheiden verbs (onderscheiden and afscheiden) do indeed make up the majority of the dataset. What is interesting is that in Vandale scheiden is an equivalent used for separate as an intransitive verb (in a inchoative sense) and not for separate as a transitive verb (in a causative sense). However the data show that a scheiden verb is also used in a causative construction, which can be illustrated by example (104). When scheiden is used in an inchoative construction, it takes a reflexive pronoun (105).

(104) We should separate it from political […] moeten we het scheiden van onze politieke sympathies. sympathieën.

(105) It is this very lack of flexibility Juist door het gebrek aan flexibiliteit that separates us from the efficient US onderscheiden wij ons van de efficiënte economy. Amerikaanse economie.

Other frequently used verbs are compound verbs containing los, for example loszien, loskoppelen, losmaken and losstaan. It can be noticed that loszien construes a causative pattern, losstaan an inchoative one. Loskoppelen and losmaken occur in causative patterns in the dataset (106), however they can be used in an inchoative one as well on the condition that they take a reflexive pronoun which can be illustrated by (107).

(106) The report cannot be separated from the We mogen dit verslag niet losmaken van de political context. politieke context.

(107) Hij maakt zich los van het geloof. OpenSoNaR

There are also some nouns used to transfer the meaning in Dutch. (108) however shows that they do not have to be derived from a verb in the dataset or any verb at all. What is also possible is that the meaning is transferred by a preposition on its own (109) and expressions are also used (110).

(108) These unfortunate events only happened […] dat zoiets alleen bij de Rio Grande gebeurt, on the Rio Grande, which separates Mexico op de grens tussen Mexico en de Verenigde from the United States. Staten. (109) […] new wall that will […] een nieuwe muur tussen hen en ons. permanently separate us from them. (110) This Chamber separates itself from them Deze vergadering houdt zich zo ver mogelijk as much as possible. van hen verwijderd.

4.1.6. Associate

Associate with has the following definition in the CCD: “If you associate someone or something with another thing, the two are connected in your mind”. This use of the verb has a causative sense. A second relevant definition is the following: “If you are associated with a particular organization, cause, or point of view, or if you associate yourself with it, you support it publicly”. The latter construction uses the verb in an inchoative sense (and it is also possible to leave out the reflexive pronoun, you associate with it, which is a more prototypical inchoative construction of a labile relational verb). However the data show that it is very often constructed with a reflexive pronoun in English.

According to Vandale, these are the Dutch equivalents of associate:

Associate (intransitive) 1. zich verenigen, zich associëren 2. (+ with) omgaan (met) Associate (transitive) 1. verenigen, verbinden, (ook figuurlijk) associëren, in verband brengen: closely associated with nauw betrokken bij

Interesting here is that associate with seems to have only one specific meaning in Dutch and it is also suggested that associate often occurs without the preposition. The CCD on the other hand only provides definitions and examples in which it is combined with with. A quick look in the Europarl corpus however shows that it is usually combined with with, however very sporadically, one can find a use of the verb without preposition: So that is the sense in which I accept Amendments Nos 17 and 18, seeking to associate the candidate countries […] in European cooperation as regards quality evaluation.

This research however focusses only on the verbs in combination with prepositions. It is interesting that the dataset does not once provide zich verenigen as a counterpart, even though that is the first equivalent provided by Vandale. Omgaan and associëren (111) on the other hand occur multiple times. The latter would be the most obvious translation that is most similar to the original. A difference between the verb in English and the one in Dutch is that a reflexive pronoun in the inchoative construction is only optional in English while it seems to be obligatory in Dutch. Vandale has also given verbinden and in verband brengen as counterparts. These do indeed occur multiple times in the dataset together with other verbs that belong to the same semantic field: verband houden, banden hebben, banden onderhouden and binden. The majority of the counterparts seems to consist of verbs that are not provided by Vandale, e.g. zich scharen achter, onderschrijven, koppelen aan, het eens zijn met, betrekken bij, betrekking hebben op, and most of all, aansluiten bij. The latter can be illustrated by (112).

(111) The Church which I belong to […] dat de Kerk waartoe ik behoor zich has associated itself with the most geassocieerd heeft met de meest fundamentalist groups. fundamentalistische groepen.

(112) I should like to associate myself with the Ik sluit me aan bij al degenen die de rapporteur numerous congratulations offered to the hebben gefeliciteerd. rapporteur.

For this verb as well there is a range of non-verbal possibilities; Nouns, adjectives, prepositions and expressions transfer the meaning of the relational verbs into Dutch.

(113) […] has now been re-arrested on the […] is nu weer gearresteerd wegens omgang grounds that he associates with foreigners. met buitenlanders. (114) It also means being tough on illegal het betekent streng zijn tegenover clandestiene immigration, which all too often is associated immigratie, te vaak synoniem met criminaliteit en with crime and exploitation. uitbuiting. (115) […] but to associate her with Marxism or […] maar haar in de hoek van het marxisme of socialism is false. socialisme plaatsen, dat is niet terecht.

4.1.7. Relate

A relevant definition in the CCD is the following: “The way that two things relate, or the way that one thing relates to another, is the sort of connection that exists between them”. The first pattern is a case of argument reduction: the two things relating to each other are expressed by one participant. Another definition is “If you can relate to someone, you can understand how they feel or behave”. In both these definitions, the verb is used in an inchoative sense. The many passive constructions in the dataset however prove that it can also occur in a causative sense.

The Dutch equivalents for relate are the following according to Vandale:

Relate (intransitive) 1. (+ to) in verband staan (met), betrekking hebben (op) Relate (transitive) 1. verhalen, berichten: strange to relate … hoe onwaarschijnlijk het ook moge klinken, maar … (bij begin van ongelofelijk verhaal) 2. (met elkaar) in verband brengen, relateren

The first point of relate as a transitive verb is not relevant in this case, only for relate in another definition, “if you relate a story, you tell it”. Interestingly, the verb that is closest to the original, namely relateren, only occurs once in the data. Also the suggested complex verbs in verband staan met and in verband brengen met each occur only once in the data. A similar compound verb, verband houden met is more prominent. It establishes an inchoative construction and could therefore be seen as an equivalent to in verband staan met. Other compound verbs that establish inchoative constructions are te maken hebben met, betreffen, betrekking hebben op and copula verb zijn. They seem to make up the majority of the

46 data set. The predominance of inchoative verbs is due to the fact that in the relate to is also used in an inchoative sense most of the time. Even though there are so many inchoative constructions, there is only a very small part that is reflexive: bezighouden met, richten op en verhouden tot. Thus the use of reflexives is a less dominant strategy here.

An interesting verb that is also used a couple of times is gaan. It also establishes an inchoative construction. The verb itself might have little to do with the meaning of relate to. However, in the data it is combined with the prepositions over and om. These combinations then have a meaning that is equivalent to relate to: betrekking hebben op (Reinsma et al 1997). Also interesting is that in the data, gaan om always has het as its subject (116), i.e. it seems to function as an impersonal verb.

(116) These measures relate mainly to four areas Het gaat hierbij met name om vier gebieden which still require clarification. waar behoefte bestaat aan verduidelijking.

No nouns are used for relate to, but adjectives an expressions occur a few times. What is used more often are prepositions, punctuation and adverbs. There is a broad range of possible prepositions, from simple prepositions to complex ones that are from the same semantic field as the complex verbs that have already been discussed. For punctuation, there is not much variety: only colons are used in this dataset. A reoccurring adverb is namelijk. They can be illustrated respectively by the following examples:

(117) […] all procedural questions related to this […] alle procedurekwesties met betrekking tot dit report should be subject to roll-call voting. verslag hoofdelijk te stemmen. (118) Another important point addressed relates Er is nog een ander belangrijk punt: de gebouwen. to the question of buildings. (119) […] one very important part of Mr Clegg 's […] een uiterst belangrijk aspect van het voorstel proposal which relates to the powers of national van de heer Clegg, namelijk de bevoegdheden regulators. van de nationale regelgevende instantie.

4.1.8. Link

Link can occur with two prepositions: with and to. Both combinations have a similar meaning: the following example (120) shows that the prepositions are interchangeable. What can also be noticed in the dataset is that the sense (causative or inchoative) seems to be the least distributed for the verb link compared to all other verbs: an inchoative construction only occurs once, also illustrated by (120)a.

(120) a. It will link strongly with the proposals […] b. It will link strongly to the proposals […]

“If two places or objects are linked or something links them, there is a physical connection between them” and “If you link one person or thing to another, you claim that there is a relationship or connection

47 between them” are two relevant definitions in this research. They both confirm the dominance of causative constructions. However, the first definition construes a different construction, one without a preposition. It is an example of argument reduction. If the ’two places or objects’ are separated into two separate elements in the sentence, a preposition would be necessary which would result in the type of labile alternation that is the subject of this research: The Rama Road, which links the capital, Managua, with the Caribbean coast (CCD) is a separated version of The Rama Road links the two places. In this aspect, it seems that link behaves in the same way as a verb like interconnect (Lemeire 2017). However, table 7 illustrates that that is not the case: link cannot really be used in an inchoative construction with argument reduction. Also, the inchoative construction without argument reduction is questionable, which confirms the dominance of a causative sense of link.

Argument reduction Full pattern The pieces interconnect One piece interconnects with the other Harriet interconnects the pieces Harriet interconnects one piece with the other *The two places link ?Managua links with the coast The Rama Road links the two places The Rama Road links Managua with the coast Table 7 Link compared to an alternation with argument reduction

According to Vandale, the Dutch equivalents for link are the following:

Link (intransitive) 1. een verbinding vormen, zich verbinden, samenkomen: link up zich aaneensluiten Link (transitive) 1. verbinden, koppelen: link hands de handen ineenslaan

Verbinden here is presented as a verb that can occur in a transitive construction (causative) and in an intransitive (inchoative) construction. In the latter sense it takes a reflexive pronoun zich. However in the dataset it is never used with zich. Moreover, none of the verbs used in the data take the reflexive pronoun. However that could have to do with the fact that link is almost never used in an inchoative sense and therefore no reflexive pronoun would be needed in Dutch. There are once again a lot of verbs from the same semantic field, e.g. banden hebben met, in verband staan met and verband houden met are verbs that construe an inchoative sense, een verband leggen and in verband brengen met establish causative constructions. Especially een verband leggen is an interesting construction. It occurs with two prepositions, met or tussen, that establish two different patterns. In all occurrences of een verband leggen met (121), the first part of the relational process is left out. However, in all these cases, that first part in the English original version is a pronoun, this, it or that. When the first part is a noun, it seems to be less acceptable to leave it out. In these cases the complex verb is combined with tussen (122). A construction with that preposition does not leave out any part of the relational process however the placement of the elements in the construction is different than in a prototypical causative construction: the preposition introduces both elements of the relational process rather than only the second.

(121) We have to link it to concrete environmental […] moeten wij een duidelijk verband leggen met problems. concrete milieuproblemen. (122) As the report acknowledges, there is no Zoals in het verslag wordt erkend, bestaat er geen conclusive research that links stereotyping beslissend onderzoek waarin een verband wordt with gender inequality. gelegd tussen stereotypering en genderongelijkheid.

Samenkomen and een verbinding vormen do not occur in the data, however koppelen is used multiple times. Even though it only occurs in a causative sense in the data, it is a verb that can occur in an inchoative sense as well, although with reflexive pronoun (123). The same applies to combineren. The SoNaR corpus shows that it can construe an inchoative sense (124) even though it does not occur like this in the dataset.

(123) Die koppelden zich vervolgens aan elkaar in talloze mogelijke combinaties OpenSoNaR (124) Van een pandemie is pas sprake als de vogelgriep zich combineert met een gewone mensengriep. OpenSoNaR

As expected, link is also translated as nouns and prepositions but they are the minority.

(125) […] the association agreement that links us […] de associatieovereenkomst met Marokko. to Morocco. (126) Indeed, how does it link this to the Lisbon Hoe ziet zij het verband met de Lissabon-agenda? agenda?

4.1.9. Compare

Compare can, just like link, occur with two prepositions: with and to. The pattern that is provided in the CCD (V n + to/with) shows that the two prepositions are interchangeable: either combination has the same meaning. The definitions also prove that the verb is labile: “If you compare one person or thing to another, you say that they are like the other person or thing” is the definition for the causative pattern. Relevant definitions for compare in an inchoative sense are the following: “If one thing compares favourably with another, it is better than the other thing”, “If you say that something does not compare with something else, you mean that it is much worse”. Interestingly, these definitions seem to suggest that the verb either has to be negated or has to be combined with the adverb favourably to establish an inchoative construction. However, examples from the data show that that is not true:

(127) […] to know how the original cost compares to the final cost?

According to Vandale, these are the Dutch equivalents of compare:

Compare (intransitive) 1. vergelijkbaar zijn, de vergelijking kunnen doorstaan: our results compare poorly with theirs onze resultaten steken mager bij de hunne af Compare (transitive) 1.vergelijken met minder bevoordeelden en daardoor beseffen dat je het zelf zo slecht nog niet hebt

This is clearly supported by the data: vergelijken is used for the majority and vergelijkbaar zijn occurs several times as well. Even though Vandale only provides vergelijken as an equivalent for compare used in a causative sense, it also occurs in an inchoative sense in the data, which can be illustrated by (128). In that case, it takes a reflexive pronoun, which is only optional in English.

(128) We must compare ourselves with other Wij [..] moeten ons dus vergelijken met andere mature economies. rijpe economieën.

Other verbs used in the dataset are not provided by Vandale. For example, gelijkstellen aan, afzetten tegen, aftoetsen aan construe a causative sense in the dataset, gelijkstaan aan, gelijk zijn aan, afsteken bij are inchoative. An interesting verb that is used multiple times is leggen (lay). The verb itself inherently does not seem to have anything to do with the meaning of compare. However when combined with the preposition naast it is an acceptable equivalent (129):

(129) If I compare this with the end result of the Als ik het eindresultaat van de conciliation procedure […] bemiddelingsprocedure daarnaast leg […]

Once again, the meaning of the relational verb can be transferred by a wide range of other elements besides verbs: nouns (derived from the used verbs), adverbs, expressions and prepositions (mostly in vergelijking met). The following example illustrate these respectively:

(130) […] municipal authorities, who compared […] lokale en gemeentelijke autoriteiten it with other fuels and, supported by various schakelden over op gas na vergelijking van instruments, switched to gas. deze energiebron met andere brandstoffen. (131) That compares with an average figure De lidstaten beschikken daarentegen gemiddeld about twice that for Member States - the figure over 5,7 ambtenaren. is 5.7 (132) […] because it compares Nazism […] nazisme en communisme op to communism in an unacceptable manner. onaanvaardbare wijze over een kam worden geschoren. (133) the EU's financial contribution is small if […] is de financiële bijdrage van de EU echter you, for instance, compare it with US nog klein in vergelijking met bij voorbeeld de payments. bedragen die de VS.

4.2. Discussion

4.2.1. English labile relational verbs in language use

First of all I would like to shortly discuss the behavior of labile relational verbs in English in the dataset. As mentioned before, the Europarl corpus was chosen because it is a corpus of bureaucratic language. In such language, it might be interesting to leave out the agent of the process or in other words to conceal responsibility. Davidse for example points out that the effective (causative) construction has a coercive angle, while a middle (inchoative) construction leaves open whether the described events were externally instigated or not (1999: 116). One could therefore expect that the data would contain a lot of inchoative uses of the verbs. The results for the verb develop for example align with that expectation: more than half of the constructions have an inchoative sense. The same goes for identify and relate. However, compare shows a completely different distribution: only a minority of the constructions has an inchoative sense. The same goes for turn, divide, separate, associate and link. Thus there is a difference in the distribution of the two senses amongst the different verbs in the dataset.

What is most interesting here is that the constructions that are not inchoative are not per definition causative. For example, consider (134) below, in which link is used in a non-finite form in a non-verbal relative clause. It is not easy to categorize the relation between uncertainty and fifteen legislations as either causative or inchoative. Forms like these are ambiguous or neutral according to Abraham: "Past participle morphemes (PPMs) by themselves are unspecific, or ambiguous, between Perfectivity (Participium Perfecti Activi = PPA) and Passivity (Participium Perfecti Passivi = PPP)” (2006: 468). Abraham also claims that "Participles are principally underdetermined as to their reading as past or passive morphemes – they remain ambiguous as morphological “roots” until the morphological context allows for categorical determination and an unambiguous semantic reading” (2006: 491). In the dataset, constructions like these will be assigned to a third category besides causative and inchoative, namely an ambiguous category. Ambiguous uses are the minority and don’t occur for all verbs in the set.

(134) This will reduce the uncertainty linked to fifteen different national legislations

Other non-finite forms such as gerunds and infinitives are not ambiguous. (135) for example contains a gerund and can easily be classified as causative. Simple passive constructions like (136) might seem hard to classify on the basis of semantics. A construction like this is more focused on the result rather than the process and it can be argued that it might be closer to an inchoative sense. However, when passive constructions are modulated by auxiliary verbs, such as in (137) the focus is more on the process and they are easier to classify as causative. In this paper, I consider all types of passives, with or without auxiliary verbs as causative constructions.

(135) Underwater tunnels linking them to the European mainland (136) The flag criterion is linked to the detention record of a ship. (137) They should not be linked with any sort of agreement

4.2.2. Correspondence with Dutch

When comparing the previous findings to the Dutch equivalents, the same thing can be noticed. Constructions are not always clearly either causative or inchoative, but they can be ambiguous. That can be illustrated by the following example (138). The past participle in this case is used as an adjective that modifies a noun. The sense is also not specified when nouns or prepositions are used as an equivalent, which can be illustrated by (139).

(138) Profitability and social responsibility […] Winstgevendheid en sociale verantwoordelijkheid cannot be separated from each other. zijn geen gescheiden, op zichzelf staande concepten. (139) the burden of the 50 years which separated de last van de vijftig jaar afscheiding van de rest us from the rest of Europe. van Europa.

One would expect that there is a correspondence between the construction used in English and the one in Dutch, i.e. that a causative use of a labile verb is translated by either a labile verb in a causative sense or by a causative verb. The same would go for inchoative constructions. Correspondence between English and Dutch can be illustrated by the following example.

(140) […] our leaders, who would like to turn […] onze leiders die Europa willen omvormen Europe into a fortress surrounded by barbed wire. tot een met prikkeldraad omgeven vesting.

However, very often, there is no correspondence between the two constructions. Example (141) illustrates a causative construction that is translated by an inchoative construction. It can also be the other way around, i.e. that a causative construction is used to translate an inchoative construction (142).

(141) […] to compare Zionism with racism […]. […] dat het zionisme gelijk zou zijn aan racisme.

(142) […] when certain districts in our major […] en sommige wijken in de grote Europese European cities are at risk of turning into ghettos. steden worden omgevormd tot getto.

4.2.3. Dutch equivalents

Now it is interesting to see which equivalents are used in Dutch to translate labile relational verbs. The equivalents have already been shortly discussed and illustrated, but in this discussion, I will take the results together in order to describe the overall findings. Central in this paper was the question how labile relational verbs are translated into Dutch. While a contrastive study using dictionaries (like De Groote 2013) would per definition result in verbal equivalents, a study of language use can (and proves to) result in equivalents of a broad variety of word classes, from adverbs and nouns to conjunctions and prepositions. Also, sometimes verbs are used in expressions in order to transfer the relational meaning. However, as would be expected, the majority of the equivalents still consists of verbs.

4.2.3.1. Nouns The nouns that are used as equivalents seem to be, in the majority of the cases, of the same semantic field as the verbs that are used as equivalents. An illustration of that is example (143). Samenhang is a nominalization of the verb samenhangen, which is used multiple times as an equivalent for associate and for other labile relational verbs in the dataset. It can be considered as a non-finite form of the verb. In that sense, it is also a case in which it is difficult to determine whether the construction has a causative or an inchoative sense. Constructions with nouns could therefore better be classified as ambiguous. Nouns are used as equivalents for all verbs at least once in the dataset, except for relate. In other words, the nominalization of verbs (or this type of non-finite form) is a reoccurring strategy to express the meaning of a labile relational verb.

(143) There is also, associated with this approach, In samenhang met dit ontwerp is ook voorzien a certain plan for compensation. in een specifiek plan voor schadevergoeding.

4.2.3.2. Expressions Secondly, a lot of verbs have some equivalents that are rather an expression than just a simple or compound verb (such as verband houden met). It is the expression as a whole in combination with the preposition that captures the meaning of the original labile relational verb. A prototypical example of such an expression would be a true idiomatic expression that always has the same form. That can be illustrated by example (144). Other expressions are more some sort of paraphrase of the verb rather than an idiomatic expression (145). Some expressions stray even further from the original, in the sense that they construe a completely different pattern and that their meaning is less directly linked to the original (146). All verbs have expressions as equivalents, except for develop and relate.

(144) […] because it compares Nazism […] omdat daarin nazisme en communisme op to communism in an unacceptable manner. onaanvaardbare wijze over een kam worden geschoren. (145) We also need these to be properly linked Dat Reglement mag ook niet botsen met het with those of the Financial Regulation. Interinstitutioneel Akkoord.

(146) I cannot identify with the argument by the Het argument van de PPE-DE-Fractie dat het Group of the European People s Party ’ (Christian MKB met artikel 4 moeite heeft, gaat er bij mij Democrats) and European Democrats that SMEs niet in. struggle with Article 4.

4.2.3.3. Verbs Thirdly, and most importantly is the discussion of the verbs that are used as equivalents. It is interesting to see whether English labile relational verbs are translated by Dutch labile verbs. If not, what are the verbs that are used as equivalents and how do they behave? As already mentioned in the literature overview, some studies have shown that Dutch makes use of some translation strategies such as ver- verbs, reflexive and periphrastic constructions. It will now be interesting to see if these strategies are

53 also used for the translation of labile verbs that are relational. All equivalents that are considered verbs are brought together in table 9.

a. Labile verbs I will start with the labile verbs. As the table already shows, there are not many different labile verbs in the Dutch equivalents. However they do occur, for example veranderen. In the data, it often occurs in an inchoative sense, for example (147) but also occurs in causative constructions, (148). As already mentioned before, the OpenSoNaR corpus shows that veranderen can also occur with a reflexive pronoun in the inchoative sense. However, that seems to be rather an exception and veranderen does not occur in such a construction in the dataset.

(147) […] and furtive liberals turn into social Ondertussen veranderen de liberalen stiekem in democrats sociaal-democraten. (148) Your economy turns everything into goods. Uw economie verandert alles in koopwaar.

Another labile verb is versplinteren. Versplinteren only occurs once in the data, yet it is still interesting to discuss because it is one of the very few labile verbs in Dutch. Its occurrence is rather complicated; it occurs in combination with another verb, raken. It could be considered a periphrastic construction such as the ones with doen and laten that have already been discussed. However in this case, the periphrastic construction seems to have an inchoative sense rather than a causative sense (such as doen and laten). Also, raken could easily be left out without changing the meaning or sense of the verb. Important for this verb as well is that it has the ability to combine the meaning of the labile relational verb and the second part of the relational process (in this case various fragments). Therefore is has the pattern of a prototypical labile verb with only one participant. However, it is also possible to make the second part explicit, which would make it fit the inchoative two-place construction that is to be expected of relational verbs. It is a labile verb because it is possible to add an Instigator which instigates the process. In short, Versplinteren can occur in two labile alternations, one between a one- and a two-participant construction and one between a two- and a three-place construction.

(149) […] the Convention has come about, which Wij hebben gezien dat de Conventie versplinterd has divided into various fragments. raakte. De conventie versplinterde in verschillende secties.

There are only a few more labile verbs in the dataset, which could lead to believe that Dutch does not have very many labile verbs. This was also confirmed in the research of De Groote: ‘ergative’ verbs only made up 12% of her dataset. In other words, both her and my research seem to confirm the proposition of Van Gelderen that English possesses many more labile verbs that other Germanic languages like Dutch (2011: 114).

b. Reflexives Since true labile verbs are rarely used in the datasets as counterparts, Dutch needs other strategies in order to allow a causative-inchoative alternation. It has already been discussed that in languages like German and Dutch, the inchoative construction of such an alternation often contains a reflexive verb. In the dataset of this research, it can be noticed that this strategy is also used frequently to translate labile relational verbs into Dutch. This can be illustrated by the following examples using the Dutch counterpart ontwikkelen tot: (150) is a causative construction, (151) has an inchoative sense.

(150) And we want to continue to develop Europol En wij willen ook Europol verder tot een into an effective unit. eenheidsstructuur ontwikkelen.

(151) Applicant countries must develop De kandidaat-landen moeten zich ontwikkelen into democratic constitutional states. tot democratische rechtsstaten.

However, the use of ontwikkelen is more complex than that. Consider example (152). Develop is used in an inchoative sense and has the expected pattern consisting of two elements: one thing develops into another. The Dutch equivalent ontwikkelen on the other hand behaves quite differently. It still consists of two elements, however it has a causative sense rather than an inchoative one, in which de EU is the Agent: de EU ontwikkelt een moderne samenwerkingsvorm. The verb ontwikkelen is, in this case, not really used as a relational process either in the sense that is central in this research: it does not imply that the EU has become a modern form of corporation itself (in the sense of (152)a). However, it is possible to adapt the sentence in order for it to have an inchoative sense as well. In that case, it only has one participant (152)b.

(152) […] will not do in the modern form of a. […] past niet in de moderne cooperation the EU has developed into. samenwerkingsvorm die de EU ontwikkeld heeft. b. Een moderne samenwerkingsvorm ontwikkelt zich.

In short, ontwikkelen allows two types of alternations. The first one is an alternation that is to be expected from a relational verb, namely one between a two-place and a three-place construction. The second alternation is one in which the verb is not specifically used as a relational verb in the same sense. It allows an alternation which is closer to prototypical labile alternations in the sense that it is an alternation between a one-participant and a two-participant construction. However, it is not comparable to constructions with argument reduction, such as The pieces interconnect – Harriet interconnects the pieces because there is no argument reduction, i.e. there is no relation between two elements that has been merged into one. This is because the verb is used as a material verb rather than a relational one. What the two alternations have in common is that they both use a reflexive verb in the inchoative construction. Thus, it is a causative-inchoative alternation that is not truly labile, but rather what Haspelmath (1993) would call an asymmetrical alternation.

The dataset does not provide many more verbs that can behave in the same way as ontwikkelen. A verb like Identificeren for example, which also takes a reflexive pronoun in the inchoative construction, occurs in an alternation between a two-place and a three-place construction, but not between a one- participant and a two-participant construction. The alternation can be illustrated by the following examples from the dataset: (153) is causative, (154) is inchoative. Verbs like these belong to the same category of asymmetrical alternations. The data also show that in a few cases, the original English verb identify is also combined with a reflexive pronoun. That can be illustrated in example (155). The pronoun however is only optional, while it is obligatory in Dutch.

(153) […] the United States Government, […] de huidige Amerikaanse regering, die which identifies security with a reduction in veiligheid identificeert met beperking van de freedom. vrijheid. (154) People still find it easier to identify Burgers identificeren zich nu eenmaal vooralsnog with their own country and their own region. gemakkelijker met hun eigen staat en hun eigen regio. (155) The citizens of our twenty-five countries De burgers van onze vijfentwintig lidstaten zullen will identify themselves with Europe […]. zich slechts definitief met Europa identificeren […].

There are a lot of verbs that only occur in a causative sense in the dataset, but that can also occur in an inchoative sense using a reflexive verb. Even though they do not show their causative-inchoative asymmetrical alternation in the dataset, it is still important to recognize them as verbs that allow such an alternation. For example losmaken van construing a causative sense in the dataset (156), but also allowing a causative sense when looking it up in the OpenSoNaR corpus (157).

(156) The report cannot be separated from the We mogen dit verslag niet losmaken van de political context. politieke context.

(157) De stad maakt zich los van de onderdrukking van Saddam. OpenSoNaR

In the list of reflexives, there are a lot of verbs that behave in a different way than the previously mentioned verbs. For example vinden in only occurs in inchoative constructions (158) and is always reflexive. It does not have a causative counterpart because it is impossible to add an Instigator to the process. Therefore, it does not allow a causative-inchoative alternation.

(158) I identify with the full content of the Ik kan me in de volledige inhoud van de voorstellen proposals contained in the draft resolution. in de ontwerpresolutie vinden.

c. Sense specific verbs The latter example brings me to a new type of equivalents. Besides labile equivalents and verbs that allow asymmetrical alternations, there are a lot of equivalents that, like vinden in, are specific for one type of construction. Vinden in was discussed together with the reflexives, however a lot of verbs that are specific for only the inchoative sense do not take a reflexive pronoun. Those verbs are listed in the table 9 under ‘inchoative’ and can be illustrated by some examples below:

(159) This time I fully identify with the spirit of the Deze keer ben ik het volledig eens met de amendment. strekking van het amendement. (160) […] and prevent it from turning into armed […] en voorkomen dat die in een gewapend conflict. conflict uitmondt.

Of course, the same goes for verbs that only construe a causative sense. These are listed in the table 9 under ‘causative’ and can be illustrated by (162). In these cases, it is not possible to leave out the Agent, or to present the process as something that happens spontaneously, on its own. Verbs like these, together with the previous verbs do not allow causative-inchoative alternations.

(162) […] the need to associate Parliament with the […] de eis om het Parlement bij de process […]. actualisering van de richtlijnen te betrekken.

An interesting finding is that for some verbs, for example compare, it can be noticed that some of those sense specific verbs form sets of verbs from the same semantic field. For example gelijkstellen is a causative equivalent for compare, and opposite to that, there are gelijkstaan en gelijk zijn as the inchoative counterparts. In other words, these verbs form a set of complementary verbs to produce a causative-inchoative alternation together. Other similar sets of complementary verbs are inchoative losstaan together with causative loszien as equivalents for separate, inchoative verband houden together with causative in verband brengen as equivalents for associate and inchoative betrekken bij together with causative betrekking hebben op for relate. The following examples illustrate such a set of complementary verbs:

(163) Today, economic activities cannot Tegenwoordig kun je economische activiteiten be separated from sustainability. niet los zien van duurzaamheid. (164) However, it cannot be separated from the We kunnen niet doen alsof deze richtsnoeren present situation. los staan van de huidige situatie.

I would like to shortly mention a type of verb that occurs as an equivalent for almost all of the verbs, namely copula verbs zijn (be) and worden (become). They construe a relation between two elements per definition and are therefore ideal as a counterpart of a relational process. They also have an inherently inchoative sense and it is not possible to add an Instigator in order to make it causative.

d. Strategies I would like to shortly discuss the other translation strategies that have been mentioned before, namely the use of periphrastic constructions and ver-verbs. Doen and laten are used as causativizers in order to construe periphrastic constructions that express causation (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997: 62). In De Groote’s research, this strategy is not found in German and it is only a minor strategy in Dutch (2013: 81). An example in this research is deel laten uitmaken van (165). The expression as a whole, in combination with laten, expresses causation. When leaving out laten, deel uitmaken van has an inchoative sense. A second example of a periphrasic construction is (166). Different here is that it is combined with the reflexive pronoun which is usually only used in inchoative constructions. This is a very interesting construction, in which the two senses are in some way combined, i.e. it is a case that is ambiguous: it is a periphrastic construction in combination with a reflexive pronoun in which the sense is not completely unambiguous. In general, the strategy of periphrastic constructions is only used sporadically in the dataset of this research.

(165) […] how well we can link it with this wider […] hoe goed wij in staat zijn haar deel te laten scenario. uitmaken van dit grotere geheel. (166) A democratically elected government Een door democratische verkiezingen gelegitimeerde cannot be separated from the people who regering laat zich niet scheiden van het volk dat elected it. haar gekozen heeft.

The strategy that is used more often is the use of ver-verbs. Verbinden, vergelijken, vereenzelvigen, verdelen, verhouden, vertalen, verwijzen, verworden and veranderen are examples of such ver-verbs that occur multiple times throughout the dataset. Others occur only once. In De Groote’s research, this is a very frequently used strategy. Moreover, almost all ver-verbs in her dataset are derived from adjectives (all except one). This research provides 15 different ver-verbs and some of them are used quite frequently. The stems of the verbs seem a lot more diverse than the one’s in De Groote’s research. The distribution can be illustrated as follows in table 8, on the basis of Van de Beld’s list of most common ver-verbs (2010). Interesting here is that van de Beld stated that the BECOME-type of ver-verbs “emerges only, without exceptions, when ver is attached to nouns or adjectives” (2010: 43). It is the BECOME-type that seemed most interesting since this research concerns relational processes. However since some of the Dutch equivalents have a verbal stem or even an idiomatic stem, other types besides BECOME are present as well. Most verbs belong to the GO-type. The MIS-type is used only once for a verb with an idiomatic stem.

Verb Stem Type Frequency Veranderen Adjectival Become 16 Verdelen Adjectival Become 66 Vereenzelvigen Adjectival Go 16 Verwijderen Adjectival Go 1 Verzelfstandigen Adjectival Become 1

Verbinden Verbal Go 67 Vergelijken Verbal Go 129 Verhouden Verbal Go 4 Verworden Verbal Go 6 Vervangen Verbal Go 1 Verwijzen Verbal Go 2 Veroorzaken Nominal Go 1 Vertalen Nominal Go 2 Versplinteren Nominal Become 1 Versjacheren Idiomatic Mis 1 Table 8 Types and stems of ver-verbs according to Van de Beld (2010).

4.2.4. Categorization

It must be noted that there are some verbs that are difficult to categorize. In this paper, the starting point is verbs that are relational and as already discussed, labile relational verbs have very specific patterns in their alternation (two-place and three-place constructions). The verbs and categories mentioned before fit in those patterns, however the deviating use of ontwikkelen already suggests that not all verbs are used as relational verbs and therefore constitute different types of patterns. Some verbs for example construe a causative sense but not in the same way a relational verb does. Consider examples (167)- (168). Realiseren and zoneren construe a causative sense, but are not relational verbs: they do not set up a relation between two entities. They are rather material verbs, i.e. processes of doing (Halliday 1985). Interesting here is that in both examples the second part of the relational process (a reality and areas) is as it were absorbed by the equivalent verb. In other words, realiseren is an equivalent for turn into a reality as a whole rather than turn into on its own. Same goes for zoneren, which is equivalent to divide into areas.

(167) […] that it is turned into a reality. […] dat het gerealiseerd wordt.

(168) This is exactly why it is important […] to divide Juist daarom is het nodig om bedrijven, these into areas, etc. werkplekken en dergelijke goed te […] zoneren.

However, sometimes verbs that do not absorb the meaning of the second part of the relational process are used as well . Consider for example the use of veroorzaken in the following example (169). The original use of develop is inchoative, setting up a relation between infection risks and fatal illnesses without any external cause. The Dutch construction also consists of the same two elements, infectierisico’s and een dodelijke ziekte. One could derive from the construction pattern that it is an inchoative construction, however when considering the true nature of the verb, it is rather a material verb than a relational one. That leads to a different analysis of the sense of the construction: it is causative. An example like this shows that it is sometimes necessary to evaluate the nature of the verb

59 in order to accurately define the sense in which it is used, because solely relying on the patterns can lead to a false analysis since the verbs are not relational but material.

(169) […] to take seriously infection risks that […] dat ze de infectierisico's serieus nemen die might develop into fatal illnesses. na jaren mogelijk een dodelijke ziekte veroorzaken.

4.2.5. Final remarks

To conclude this discussion, I will mention some last remarks. First of all, the different strategies used in the dataset of this research seem to be distributed unevenly among the different verbs, which is visible in table 9. For example, there are a lot of equivalents that are or can be used reflexive for identify, while there are a lot less of such verbs for link and compare. On the other hand, there are a lot of causative verbs for link while there are only a few for identify. One thing that is equal for all verbs however is that there are very few labile verbs, if not none. Secondly, there are verbs that occur as equivalents for more than one original verb. As already mentioned, that is the case for copula verbs, but that is also the case for other verbs. For example, verbinden is an equivalent for relate, associate, identify and link. It is even used as an equivalent for separate when the latter is negated. The same goes for verband houden, which is an equivalent for link, relate and associate. That can be due to the general meanings of both relational verbs (linking) and labile verbs (change). Thirdly, even though this research does not focus on the use of prepositions, I would still like to mention that it is very obvious that prepositions are an important element in the equivalents as well. The majority of the verbs is combined with a preposition, even nouns often are combined with one or two and there are a number of cases where a preposition on its own has taken over the meaning of the relational verb in combination with a preposition. That is often the case when the sense of original verb is ambiguous, since a preposition also leaves the sense in the middle. That can be illustrated by (170). However, prepositions are also used on their own when the original use is clearly either causative or inchoative, which can be illustrated by (171).

(170) There are very clear warning signs with De risico’s van ftalaten zijn zeer evident. regard to the risks associated with phthalates.

(171) We are going to discuss three reports Wij behandelen in dit gecombineerd debat drie which relate to four Commission proposals. verslagen over vier voorstellen van de Commissie.

Fourthly, besides prepositions there are other elements that can express the meaning of a relational verb. For example punctuation, adverbs, conjunctions, correlative constructions are used throughout the dataset to construe a relation between two elements. I chose not to go into detail with respect to these equivalents, however I also chose not to leave them out of the dataset because I do think they are interesting and worth mentioning. Even though they only make up the minority of equivalences, each English verb has at least one non-verbal equivalent. This shows that in language use, the choice for a non-verbal equivalent is sometimes preferred. Whether there is a link between the sense of the original

60 verb and a non-verbal equivalent (for example, are non-verbal equivalents used more when the use of the original verb is ambiguous?) is not within the scope of this research but it would be very interesting to investigate.

Fifthly, it would be possible to place the categories of equivalents on a continuum from more to less prototypical along the lines of the categorization of labile relational verbs in English (Lemeire 2017). Least prototypical would be the category of non-verbal equivalents, which are farthest away from the original. Then, there would be the nouns and expressions, since they are, as already mentioned, verbal in some sense: expressions contain a verb and nouns can (mostly) be considered non-finite forms of verbs. Most prototypical would be the category of verbs, more specifically the labile verbs in Dutch. However, there are very few of these. A bit less prototypical but more frequently used would be the verbs that construe a causative-inchoative alternation with a reflexive verb in the inchoative pattern. Least prototypical within the category of verbs are the sense specific verbs that construe either a causative or an inchoative sense.

4.2.6. Overview

Table 9 provides an overview of all the verbs that occur in the dataset for each original English verb. The equivalents are categorized on the basis of the type of construction they produce. They either produce a causative or an inchoative construction or they are labile and construe both or they are reflexive. In the case of the reflexive verbs, the ones that can take place in a causative-inchoative alternation are underlined, the ones that only construe an inchoative pattern are not underlined. In the whole overview, the ver-verbs are marked in bold. Lastly, there are a lot of verbs that only occur once in the datasets (hapaxes). These are marked with an asterisk.

It must be noted that the categorization in table 9 is not only based on what is found in the dataset, but also on the possible patterns the verb can occur in. For example afzetten tegen only occurs as a causative construction such as in (172). However it is important to realize that this verb can also occur in an inchoative construction, on the condition that it takes a reflexive pronoun. Therefore, the equivalent afzetten tegen is placed in the subcategory of reflexives, more specifically a verb that allows a causative- inchoative alternation. In order to check whether certain verbs can occur with a reflexive pronoun it is not enough to rely solely on introspection or intuition, therefore the use of such verbs with reflexive pronouns is always checked in the SoNaR corpus to see whether it really occurs in such a way in language use. For afzetten tegen, it provided the inchoative construction with a reflexive pronoun in (173).

(172) We need to compare this to EUR 150 billion Dat moeten we afzetten tegen de 150 miljard in 2000 to 2006. EUR in de periode van 2000 tot 2006.

(173) Tool zet zich af tegen de traditionele marketing. OpenSoNaR

Verb Causative Inchoative True labile Asymmetrical (reflexive) Identify Aanhouden* Aanspreken Aansluiten bij Begrip tonen voor Banden hebben met* Associëren met Confronteren* Delen* Betrokken voelen bij* In verband brengen met* Eens zijn met Geroepen voelen tot* Krijgen achter* Ervaren* Herkennen in Gelijkstellen met Hebben* Identificeren met In overeenstemming brengen Samenvallen met Inleven in met* Sympathie hebben voor* Meten aan* Gepaard gaan met Scharen achter Kampen met* Verbinden met* Staan achter Verbonden voelen met Vereenzelvigen met Vinden in Voorstellen*

Turn Afschilderen als* Aanleiding geven tot* Veranderen (van) in Concretiseren* Afstemmen op* Bereiken* Verzelfstandigen* Omtoveren in Beschouwen als Functioneren als* Omturnen tot Bombarderen tot Uitdraaien op Omvormen tot/in Brengen in Uitmonden in Omzetten (van) in Doorvoeren tot Worden (tot) Ontwikkelen tot Gebruiken als* Zijn Voltrekken als* Gestalte geven aan* Ontaarden in Vormen* Herleiden tot* Ontstaan Veranderen (van) in Laten functioneren als* Overgaan in Vertalen in Maken (tot)/(van) Uitgroeien tot Opblazen tot* Komen (tot) Overstappen van op* Krijgen* Plaatsmaken voor* Leiden tot Realiseren Leven* Uitwerken* Omslaan in Versjacheren als Overgaan in Vervangen door Verworden tot

Voegen bij* Voltooien* Voorkomen Divide Aanbrengen in* Bestaan uit Versplinteren in* Bezighouden met* Opbouwen naar* Omvatten* Verbrokkelen in* Delen in/door Opsluiten in* Uiteenvallen in Splitsen in Indelen in Samenvatten als Zijn* Onderscheiden aan* Vastleggen in* Onderverdelen in Zoneren* Opdelen in Opsplitsen in Scheiden in Splitsen in Toespitsen op Verdelen in/over/tussen Develop Maken van Ontstaan (door) Ontwikkelen Doorontwikkelen tot* Noemen naar* Evolueren (van) naar/tot (als)/(tot)/(uit)/(vanuit)/ Ontwikkelen Opleiden tot* Groeien van (vanwege) (als)/(tot)/(uit)/(vanuit)/ Uitbouwen tot Uitmonden in Veranderen in (vanwege) Veroorzaken* Leiden tot Omvormen tot Ontaarden in Ontpoppen als* Opkomen Veranderen in Voortkomen Worden Ontstaan (door)/(uit) Opleveren* Resulteren in* Uitdijen in Uitgroeien tot/van Uitlopen in* Verworden tot Voortkomen uit Worden (van) Zijn

Separate Loszien van Losstaan (van) Afscheiden (van) Halen van* Afsnijden van Tillen uit* Afsplitsen uit Uitsluiten van* Isoleren van Wegbrengen van* Loskoppelen van Weghalen bij* Losmaken van Losweken van* Onderscheiden van Scheiden van Verbinden met Verwijderen van Associate Verwijzen naar Banden hebben met* Vinden Aangaan met* Banden onderhouden met* Aansluiten bij Akkoord gaan met* Betrekking hebben op Associëren met Betrekken bij Betrokken raken bij Beklagen over* Combineren met Contact hebben met* Delen* Denken aan Contact onderhouden met Binden aan In verband brengen met Deel uitmaken van Inlaten met* Liëren aan Eens zijn met Inzetten voor* Meedoen aan Hebben* Koppelen aan Omgaan met Opspelen bij Scharen achter Onderschrijven Samenhangen met Verbinden aan/met Oproepen* Schuilgaan achter* Vinden in Steunen* Sprake zijn van* Toekennen* Te maken hebben met* Toeschrijven* Verband houden met Verwijzen naar Voortvloeien uit Zijn* Relate Aangeven* Aansluiten bij* Baseren op Behandelen* Afhangen van* Bezighouden met* Betrekken bij* Bestrijken* Richten op* In verband brengen met Betekenen* Verbinden met Liëren aan* Betreffen Verhouden tot Relateren aan* Betrekking hebben op

Verwijzen naar Gaan om/over Gepaard gaan met* In verband staan met* Lopen over* Raken Samengaan met Samenhangen met Te maken hebben met Vallen onder* Verband houden met Verweven zijn met* Zijn Link Bepalen* Aansluiten bij* Binden (aan) Betrekken bij* Afhangen van Verbinden aan/met Combineren met Afhankelijk blijven van* Koppelen aan Deel laten uitmaken van* Afhankelijk zijn van* Baseren op Een band leggen met* Banden hebben met* Een verband leggen met* Betreffen* In samenhang brengen met* Impliceren* In verband brengen met Sprake zijn van* Liëren aan Betrekking hebben op Loszien van* Gepaard gaan met Noemen bij* In verband staan met* Relateren aan Overeenkomen met* Toepassen op* Samenhangen met Verband leggen met/tussen Te maken hebben met Van invloed zijn op* Verband houden met Verwant zijn met* Verweven zijn met* Voortvloeien uit* Compare Aftoetsen aan* Afsteken bij Afzetten tegen Gelijkstellen aan Gelijk zijn aan* Meten met* Leggen naast Gelijkstaan aan* Verhouden tot

Vergelijking maken met* Lijken op Vergelijken met Overeenkomen met* Vergelijkbaar zijn met Voldoen aan Opwegen tegen*

Table 9 English labile relational verbs and their equivalents in Dutch

5. Conclusion

This dissertation consists of two major parts. First of all, it gave an overview of the necessary knowledge provided by existing literature on lexical ergativity, lability and relational processes. The starting point was a work on the crossroads of lability and relational verbs in English (Lemeire 2017) which provided a list of labile verbs that are also relational. Then I gave an overview of the concept of ergativity in Dutch and the possible strategies that are linked to it. Lastly, I shortly described a contrastive study of Dutch, English and German that has been carried out by De Groote (2013). She discusses the equivalents on the basis of dictionary data from a quantitative perspective and gives an overview of the possible translation strategies that occur in her corpus.

In the light of the literature overview, it was possible to carry out a study of my own in order to continue the research on labile relational verbs. Listing the labile relational verbs and describing their characteristics was a start and to examine those verbs in actual language use seemed a logical next step in the study of their behavior. For the second part of this dissertation, I therefore chose a contrastive study of English and Dutch using the Europarl corpus, i.e. user data. The angle of approach is a qualitative one rather than quantitative and the aim is to describe and categorize the Dutch equivalents of the English labile relational verbs in the light of the strategies that are already known and to see if there are other strategies used as well.

First of all, the equivalents do not always have to be verbal. Other elements that are less prototypical equivalents for a verb are used throughout the dataset, for example prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs or even punctuation. These elements can take over the meaning of a labile relational verb in combination with a preposition, however they are not used very frequently. Although that is a very interesting finding, I chose to not go into further detail about these equivalents.

Secondly, the use of nouns and expressions is also a reoccurring strategy used to transfer the meaning of a labile relational verb into Dutch. Expressions are idiomatic expressions and paraphrases that always contain a verb and that have a specific sense. Nouns can be considered a non-finite form of a verb and leave the sense in the middle. This second category of equivalents is already a bit closer to the original form than the previous category since they are verbal in some sense. However they do not make up the majority of the equivalents either.

The most important and most frequently used type of equivalent are the verbs. In general, they are closer to the original than the first two categories, however within the category of verbs there is a lot of variation: some verbs construe either a causative or an inchoative sense. A few of them can be considered complementary sets of verbs, for example loszien and losstaan, in which the first construes a causative sense and the second an inchoative one. Another possibility is that a Dutch verb can construe a causative-inchoative alternation on the condition that the verb in the inchoative construction is reflexive. In this case it is less relevant to speak of lability since the verb form does not stay the same in both constructions of the alternation, more specifically, it is an asymmetrical alternation rather than a

67 labile one. This strategy is used very frequently in the dataset. However, some verbs are reflexive but can only be used in an inchoative construction and therefore cannot construe a causative-inchoative alternation. Lastly, very few of the equivalent verbs are verbs that behave in the same way as the originals, i.e. that are labile verbs. This confirms what is already thought, namely that Dutch does not have many labile verbs, or at least a lot less than English. Within the category of verbs, it can also be noticed that there are several ver-verbs, which is according to literature another strategy used in Dutch besides reflexives. The strategy of periphrastic constructions, used to construe a causative sense, is only used sporadically.

I hope to have provided some more insights into the phenomena of both lability in the domain of relational processes and lability in Dutch. However there is still much more research to be done in a domain of grammar as complex as this one. Interesting would be to carry out a comparative research from a quantitative perspective of labile relational verbs to compare with the quantitative study by De Groote (2013). That would allow to see whether there is a difference between the distribution of Dutch translation strategies used for material labile verbs and those used for relational labile verbs. Another interesting study could be to examine other labile relational verbs in English that were not used in this research, for example the less prototypical alternations like the location subject alternation, or constructions with argument reduction. I hope that this was a first step into the direction of more detailed research on labile relational verbs, because I believe that the possibilities are endless.

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