Three verbs referring to the posture or position of the subject of a clause, namely sit to sit, lê to lie and staan to stand, and a verb of motion, loop to walk, which can function as main verbs in their own right, are linked in a process of auxiliation to the main verb in that they share a subject with the main verb and consistently precede the main verb. They have also undergone semantic bleaching allowing them to strengthen the durative or progressive aspect of the clause as a whole rather than describing specific postures.

The evolution of postural verbs from a locative function to a construction indicating that the subject is in the process of performing a certain action is described by Breed and Brisard(2015). Broekhuis et al. (2015) suggest that the bleaching of the postural verb in the course of its becoming aspectual may be related to the fact that the action in question is not always visible to the speaker, e.g.

The postural verb which is selected is usually appropriate to the type of action expressed by the main verb (e.g. sit en eet sitting and eating), unless the speaker intends to express a deviation from the normal practice (e.g. lê en eet lying and eating), as in (10a), or a metaphorical expression is used, as in (10b):

These verbs are also employed to express emotive connotations, somewhat derogatory in some instances, e.g.

According to Van Schoor (1983:173) the V-en-V construction (“verbale hendiadis”) always has an unfavourable implication or emotive value.

Since postural/motion verbs, as in (12a), express durative aspect they do not combine well with progressive constructions, or seem tautological, as in (12c) and (12d):

The four postural/motion verbs partake in a construction characterised by the coordinatoren, which according to Ponelis (1979:241) has become a construction specific particle. Though modern Dutch uses the infinitival particle te in a corresponding construction, the usage of en in this function is attested in earlier Dutch. While en is omitted by some speakers in the case of sit to sit, lê to lie and staan to stand, e.g. sit eet instead of sit en eet, loop en eet to eat while walking should be distinguished from a slightly derogatory loop eet without en, meaning ‘go to eat’, cf. the accusing tone of the following:

The usage of loop plus verb without en is described elsewhere and is functionally different from the V-en-V construction described here.

V-en-V constructions are not only related to coordinated en constructions, but sometimes indistinguishable from them. Thus while (14a) and (14b) are fully-fledged co-ordinated constructions where postures are described rather than durative aspect expressed, the verbs sit and staan in (14ai) and (14bi) mainly express durative aspect:

Van Schoor (1983:173) describes the first member of the construction, i.e. the postural verb, as used in the perfect, as a past participle: Ek het gesit en slaap I sat sleeping.. A limited search in the Taalkommissiekorpus indicated that the numbers of the entire set of postural verbs in perfect constructions with and without ge are roughly equal, e.g., with and without prefix:

The V-en-V complex occurs without interruption in various positions in the clause without stranding of the main verb, e.g. in verb-second position (16a), in verb-first position (16b), clause-finally (16c), and as full infinitive in (16d).

While the postural/motion verb always precedes the main verb, the placement of en vis-à-vis either of them is dependent on whether the postural/motion verb is situated in V2/1 or not.