Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch 201Table 1. Observed benefactive ditransitives^6
Netherlandic subcorpora Belgian subcorpora
total ditransitives total ditransitives
kopen ‘buy’ 11046 9 5914 75
halen ‘get, fetch’ 7131 1 7905 7
bestellen ‘order’ 992 0 954 3
bouwen ‘build’ 1803 0 2339 3
bakken ‘bake’ 469 (1) 554 1
tekenen ‘draw’ 965 0 1207 0
Table 2. Detailed results for kopen ‘buy’
ditransitive occurrences other occurrences
CONDIV newspaper
- Netherlandic subcorpus 3 860
- Belgian subcorpus 22 1986
Χ² (N=2871, df=1) = 3.91; p = .0479
CONDIV Usenet
- Netherlandic subcorpus 4 8236
- Belgian subcorpus 28 2762
Χ² (N=11030, df=1) = 65.72; p < .0001
Corpus of spoken Dutch
- Netherlandic subcorpus 2 1941
- Belgian subcorpus 25 1091
Χ² (N=3059, df=1) = 37.01; p < .0001
For the other verbs, the frequencies are too small to allow meaningful sta-
tistical analysis, but it is noteworthy that virtually all observed ditransitive
uses occur in the Belgian subcorpora. There are two exceptions: ditransitive
bakken ‘bake’ is attested once in the Netherlandic part of the CONDIV
newspaper corpus, and ditransitive halen ‘get, fetch’ is attested once in the
Netherlandic part of the Corpus of spoken Dutch. Both of these “excep-
tional” Netherlandic examples merit some further discussion. First, com-
pare the two ditransitive examples with bakken ‘bake’ in (11).
(11) a. Ik heb haar een doos noten gebracht en zij gaat mij nu een koek
bakken.<forum.tuinadvies.be/8_2641_Walnoten_of_okkernoten.htm>
‘I took her a box of nuts and now she is going to bake me a cake’