'Zetten' of 'leggen': hoe Franstalige leerders van het Nederlands spreken en gebaren over plaatsingsverschijnselen

This research presents the results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the use of the Dutch placement verbs zetten (‘put’) and leggen (‘lay’) by French-speaking learners of Dutch. The experiment consisted of two parts: a receptive as well as a productive part. The analysis focused on two aspects: speech, but also the gestures made by the participants were both quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. The results confirm that the use of Dutch placement verbs is problematic for French-speaking learners of Dutch, but they also reveal some important tendencies. First, my analysis demonstrates that French-speaking learners tend to underuse these verbs, which can be explained by the fact that placement events in French are often described by means of a neutral verb such as mettre (‘put’) as opposed to the more specific verbs in Dutch. Secondly, the learners occasionally also tend to overuse the placement verbs in contexts where such verbs are not allowed, an observation which is seemingly paradoxical to the first one. Thirdly, some learners also tend to confuse zetten with leggen and vice versa. These findings are interesting given that the Dutch placement verbs, with a few exceptions, remain a relatively unexplored area within the field of linguistics.