Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch 193

presents the results of a small scale corpus investigation into the use of

benefactive ditransitives in the two national varieties of the language, Neth-

erlandic and Belgian Dutch, and Section 4 develops a hypothesis which

accounts for the observed regional variation in terms of a semantic contigu-

ity constraint. This discussion will involve a brief comparison with the

equivalent English ditransitive construction. Section 5 briefly looks into

another kind of lectal variation, viz. register variation, and Section 6 sum-

marizes the main findings.

2. On the “benefactive” ditransitive construction

2.1. Caused reception and benefaction

Many languages exhibit a three-participant argument structure construction

which, in addition to all kinds of events in which an agent instigates a

transfer of a patient towards a recipient, can also encode events which in-

volve a beneficiary rather than a (prototypical) recipient as the third partic-

ipant. Polish is a case in point: as shown by the examples from Dąbrowska

(1997: 25–35) in (1) below, the Polish construction with dative and accusa-

tive objects can be used to encode prototypical transfer of possession

events (1a–b) as well as events in which somebody carries out an action for

the benefit of somebody else (1c–f). The dative object codes either the reci-

pient or the beneficiary. For further discussion of the similarity between the

encoding of events of caused reception and events of benefaction attested in

many of the world’s languages, see Shibatani (1996), Newman (1996: 95–

97) and Kittilä (2005), inter alia.

(1) a. Dał /Ofiarował jej obraz.

he gave/he presented her:DAT picture:ACC

‘He gave her a picture./He presented her with a picture.’

b. Wysłał / Podał jej książkę.
he sent/ he handed her:DAT book:ACC
‘He sent/handed her the book.’

c. Ala uszyła mi sukienkę.
Ala:NOM sewed me:DAT dress:ACC
‘Ala sewed me a dress.’