Complementen met en zonder MET bij werkwoorden van 'toenemen' en 'afnemen'

In many cases, Dutch verbal complements show syntactic variation in that they can be prepositional or non-prepositional. This paper focuses on the preposition met ‘with’ in the context of verbs referring to processes of increasing and decreasing, in which prepositional and non-prepositional complements function as ‘measure phrases’ and specify the measure of the change. The condusion is that the choice between the two alternatives is determined by a slight but often dearly noticeable difference in perspective: the prepositional variant signals relative ‘distance’ and is related to extensions to, for example, buildings or to calculations, estimates and personal evaluations on the part of the speaker, whereas the non-prepositional variant presents the complement as the observable change in the size of primarily internal, inherent qualities.