A contrastive analysis of placement verbs in German and Dutch

German and Dutch are two closely related Germanic languages that use many posture and placement verbs, not only to describe the concrete position of an entity, but also to designate its location in space. In this chapter, I study the use of the verbs Germ. stellen/Dt. stellen (‘to put in a standing position’), Germ. setzen/Dt. zetten (‘to put in a sitting position’), and Germ. versetzen/Dt. verzetten (‘to put/move’) in abstract and fixed phrases, such as Germ. an den Pranger stellen (‘to put in the pillory’) and Dt. in de bloemetjes zetten (literally ‘to put into the flowers’ = ‘to treat like a king’). Among these phrases I am looking more specifically at the subcategory of complex noun-verb phrases (commonly referred to as “Funktionsver-bgefüge” in German) like Dt. in beweging zetten (‘to bring into motion’) and Germ. in einen Ausnahmezustand versetzen (‘to put into a state of emergency’). An analysis of data from the corpora DeReKo, Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands, deTenTen13, and nlTenTen14 in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics shows that the use of these verbs is not arbitrary. The selection of the verbs is linked to specific conceptuali-sations like Force, Dynamicity, and Control, to name just a few. Hence, I aim to show that a perfect analogy between German and Dutch cannot be assumed at all. In fact, the use of the placement verbs, which at first sight seems very similar in both languages, is characterised by some important differences.