This article presents the results of a quantitative and qualitative corpus study of the use of the Dutch posture verbs staan ('stand'), liggen ('lie') and zitten ('sit') by French-speaking learners of Dutch. In addition to providing a quantified insight into which uses of these verbs prove most problematic to the L2 learners, the study has also revealed three important tendencies. Firstly, in line with the typological di¤erences between French and Dutch (where these verbs behave like noun classifiers), our analysis confirms the French-driven tendency of the learners for underusing these verbs. Secondly, seemingly paradoxical to the previous point, is that these learners occasionally overuse these posture verbs in contexts where no such verb is allowed. Thirdly, our qualitative analysis of errors reveals that the learners operate on grammaticised semantic distinctions drawn from the target language. Even if the categories used by L2 speakers may not be the same as those exploited by native speakers, our analysis suggests that the L2 speakers are thus aware of the patterns in the input and exploit them in a fashion that may not di¤er all that much in kind from those in L1 acquisition.

There is a long tradition of linguistic research on political discourse, but little attention has been paid to what the concept of political discourse itself encompasses. With this in mind, this article aims to understand what types of discourse are categorized as ‘political’ in linguistic research and what their characteristics are (form, type of actors, policy domains, geographical coverage). To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review of 164 scientific articles from the Scopus database. Overall, the findings show that political discourse is generally limited to the discourses of (institutionalized) political elites and most specifically to oral monological speeches. The review also highlights discrepancies regarding the geographical scope and the policy domains covered by the empirical analyses, more specifically a bias toward the Western world and issues related to external defense policies, justice and home affairs.

The article deals with the typological differences between the Romance language French and the Germanic languages German and Dutch for the linguistic expressions of posture and location. It describes how these typological differences can be problematic for French-speaking learners of German and Dutch. The main difference between both types of languages is that posture and location tend to be encoded by posture verbs in Germanic languages and by very general verbs in Romance languages (Talmy 2000). After a detailed description of the semantic networks of the German and Dutch posture verbs, the paper takes a critical look at how these expressions are dealt with in teaching manuals. It further presents strategies for the efficient teaching of posture verbs to foreign language learners. These strategies are among others awareness-raising exercises about the compulsory use of posture verbs in Germanic languages and the description of conceptual metaphors in different languages. These pedagogical avenues for the efficient teaching of the Dutch and German posture verbs constitute a first step towards the elaboration of an experimental set-up aiming at verifying them.

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