Journal
Papers of the Linguistic Society of Belgium, vol. 19 (2025)
Author(s)
Isa Hendrickx
Abstract
This paper presents a pilot study on verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in translated Dutch. VPCs combine a base verb (e.g., werken ‘work’) with a preverbal element (e.g., uit ‘out’), and, while well-studied in Dutch, their translation has received less attention. Building on Cappelle and Loock (2017), this study explores whether cross-linguistic differences between Germanic and Romance languages influence VPC use in Dutch translations. Since VPCs are more typical in Germanic than in Romance languages, a ‘shining through’ effect is expected. The analysis focuses on VPCs with op, af, and uit, using 100 parallel concordances per language per VPC from the OpenSubtitles corpus (Tiedemann 2011). Results show that VPCs occur more often in Dutch translations from English than from French – supporting previous findings and underscoring the importance of contrastive analysis in translation studies.