The Emergence of the Descriptive Perception Verb Construction in Dutch: Syntactic and Semantic Developments

This article traces the syntactic and semantic development of the Descriptive Perception Verb Construction from Early Middle Dutch to present-day Dutch. The Dutch Descriptive Perception Verb Construction takes the simplified form [SUBJSTIM V PRED], e.g., Hij klinkt moe ‘He sounds tired’, where the subject is the stimulus of the perceptual event and the verb is followed by a predicative complement, e.g., an adjective. In its verb slot, this construction has one of the five Dutch descriptive perception verbs: eruitzien ‘look’, klinken ‘sound’, voelen ‘feel’, ruiken ‘smell’, and smaken ‘taste’. In this article, I show that while there are two attested initial stages (i.e., the transitive construction and the intransitive construction) with two distinct bridging contexts enabling the emergence of this construction, the endpoint is the same: the constructionalization of the new Descriptive Perception Verb Construction. This new construction allows for the coercion of an implicit proposition, which expresses factivity, subjectivity and whose verb marks direct evidence. I hypothesize that over time the requirement to mark factivity is loosened for all verbs, and the marking of direct evidence is lost for eruitzien and klinken, indicating that these two verbs are further ahead in the semantic development of the Descriptive Perception Verb Construction.