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Abstract
Dutch uses cardinal posture verbs (zitten ‘to sit’, staan ‘to stand’, and liggen ‘to lie’) for all sorts of purposes, many of which have received considerable research attention – like the posture progressive, e.g. zitten te lezen ‘lit. sit to read: to be reading’. This paper investigates a posture verb pattern in which a posture verb is combined with a past participle, e.g. zitten verstopt ‘lit. sit hidden: to be hidden’. Previous analyses disagree on whether these patterns correspond to a fixed set of combinations, or to a productive schema with semantic restrictions. By examining over 6,000 attestations of the pattern, this paper evaluates these competing accounts, concluding that the data point strongly at productivity.