Does a hotel stand or lie?: A corpus-based study on the German positional verbs 'stehen' and 'liegen'

This study investigates the semantic difference between two German positional verbs, stehen ‘to stand’ and liegen ‘to lie’. The semantic characterisation proposed by previous studies can be generally summarised in terms of dimensionality: stehen presupposes a three-dimensional perception of a scene, whereas liegen evokes an abstract two-dimensional image of a scene, ignoring height. This study verifies the characterisation in terms of dimensionality using an analysis of co-occurring expressions based on corpora. It further provides a detailed illustration of the semantics of the verbs by categorising words and phrases which can be related to the dimensional meaning of each verb.