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Dutch has three seem-type verbs (schijnen, lijken, blijken), which behave in clearly different ways, although they can all be regarded as epistemicevidential markers in some of their uses. This paper addresses the semantic contribution of blijken, its morpho-syntactic variability and the possible link between both. The analysis is based on data taken from the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (CGN). One of the main findings of this paper pertains to the fact that blijken not only has (typically intersubjective) epistemic-evidential meaning, but also expresses mirativity, especially in those constructional patterns in which the qualification expressed by the verb is non-focal (and hence has only secondary information status). The corpus data show that such non-focal uses of blijken can occur in every construction type the verb occurs in, but clearly favour inherently non-focalizing syntactic patterns like the auxiliary use of blijken with a te-infinitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutch van is used to mark emotions and feelings which cause bodily reactions and mental states in combinations such as rillen van angst 'shiver with fear', sprakeloos van verbazing 'speechless with astonishment' and blaken van zelfvertrouwen 'beam with self-confidence'. The classification of emotions along the four dimensions of evaluation (valence), potency (control), activation (arousal) and (un)predictability of Fontaine (2006) is discussed and shown to be of linguistic interest. Predicates such as stralen 'beam' or het uitschreeuwen 'to cry (it) out' have strong collocation relations with words denoting emotional extremes on one of the four axes, such as high valence or high arousal. While most of the paper is devoted to the construction with causative van, some suggestive evidence from adverbs of degree is offered to make a broader case for the usefulness of the four dimensions in linguistic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]