所在を表す動詞の競合: オランダ語 staan と zitten を例に

Abstract

オランダ語の動詞staan(英:stand)、zitten(英:sit)、liggen(英:lie)は、人間の姿勢を表す用法、物体の所在を表す用法などのほか、進行相の助動詞としての用法もあり、それぞれの観点から多くの研究蓄積がある(vandeToorn 1972, van Oosten 1984, Lemmens 2002, Lemmens 2005など)。本稿は、これらの動詞が物体の所在を表す場合について、特にstaanとzittenの使用が競合するときを対象としたケーススタディである。 This paper examines the interchangeability of Dutch verbs staan ((en.) stand) and zitten ((en.) sit) to describe the situation where a hat is on someone’s head. To indicate the location of an object, it is said that there are six specific locational verbs in Dutch including staan and zitten, which are also canonical posture verbs. The verbs staan hardly occurs to express the locative relation between an object and a human (body), while zitten is most frequently used for this purpose. Therefore it is not surprising that the literature pointed out that almost only zitten is used to mention the hat-is-on-the-head situation. On the other hand, some native speakers totally accept, or even prefer, the use of staan in this situation. This paper shows, based on the questionnaire survey, that both verbs can be used to describe a hat put on someone’s head, though a cap or a knit cap on his/her head cannot be expressed with staan. This can be rightly explained in terms of the meaning of both verbs. Furthermore, the results indicate that males tend to prefer one verb to the other, whereas females have a tendency to accept both. This might be the indication of acceptability of both verbs in the standard language. These results can be evidence to prove that innumerable possible situations in the world can be categorized in Dutch according to how a situation matches the meaning of verbs, eventually forming a continuum of situations.