Diachroon corpusonderzoek naar complexe predicaten in het Nederlands: Een pilootstudie

For the development of complex predicates in Dutch, Blom (2004: 45) hypothesized that non-resultative elements can grammaticalize into separable particles, progressing into inseparable prefixes, while resultative elements can only evolve into separable particles, but no further. This paper evaluates Blom’s hypothesis, focusing on six verbs: ondergaan ‘go down; undergo’, onderdrukken ‘suppress’, onderwerpen ‘subject’, overtuigen ‘convince’, overreden ‘persuade’, and overhandigen ‘hand over’, the last five of which at first glance seem to contradict this hypothesis. Using the EDGeS-corpus (Bouma et al. 2020) and a subset of the DBNL (following Van Olmen 2019), which span Middle Dutch to contemporary Dutch data, we examine the verbs’ form and semantics. By proposing alternative explanations for three of the five exceptions, we argue that Blom’s hypothesis can largely be upheld. However, the verbs onderdrukken ‘suppress’ and onderwerpen ‘subject’ remain problematic, requiring further analyses to fully assess the validity of the hypothesis.