oa Postulêre werkwoorde as progressiewe merkers in Afrikaans en Nederlands

This article discusses the way in which the VPOS+and+VINF-periphrastic construction is used in Afrikaans to express progressive aspectual meaning. The discussion is based on the results of a corpus based investigation which examined the specific ways in which the use of this construction differs from that of the other two Afrikaans periphrastic progressive constructions, namely the aan+die/’t+VINF construction and the is+besig+om+te+VINF-construction. Since three peer constructions can be identified in Dutch (i.e. the VPOS+te+VINF, the aan+het+VINF and the zijn+bezig+te+VINFconstruction), the Afrikaans VPOS en-construction was, where relevant, compared with the Dutch VPOS te-construction. The article also shows the way in which the VPOS en-construction came into being. To indicate the way in which the use of this construction differs from the uses of the other constructions mentioned, the grammaticalisation theory was used to firstly look at the frequency of the construction and secondly at the verb collocations of this construction.