Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch 205landic Dutch, and examples like (16c) are occasionally found in Belgian
texts only.(16) a. Albert wil jij me nog een glaasje wijn inschenken?
[Corpus of spoken Dutch_NL]
‘Albert, can you pour me another glass of wine?’
b. Volgens O. kocht de la Brassine hem ooit voor 100.000 frank nieuwe
kleren in een “boetiek” aan de Anspachlaan.
[CONDIV_newspaper_B]
‘According to O., de la Brassine once bought him 100,000 francs worth
of new clothes in a “boutique” in the Anspach Avenue.’
c. [I]k ga me een schuilkelder bouwen.
[CONDIV_Usenet_B]
‘I’m going to build myself a bomb shelter.’This goes to show that, compared to English, there must be additional se-
mantic constraints at work in Dutch.4.2. Two subeventsAs a starting point for an elucidation of these additional constraints, con-
sider Goldberg’s (1995, 2002) semantic paraphrase of the ditransitive sub-
sense instantiated by I baked him a cake etc. again: ‘Agent intends to cause
recipient to receive patient’. This paraphrase adequately fulfils Goldberg’s
aim to illustrate the semantic relatedness of benefactive ditransitives to
other instantiations of the (English) ditransitive: the benefactive ditransitive
is not a category sui generis, but fits nicely in the family of ‘caused recep-
tion’ senses displayed by the schematic ditransitive construction. On a more
detailed level of analysis, however, a formulation in terms of intended cau-
sation of reception insufficiently distinguishes this benefactive subsense
from other subsenses. In a way, for instance, clauses such as Let’s send him
a letter or I’ll throw you the ball can be said to involve intended causation
of reception as well (in that successful completion of the transfer is not
guaranteed). The specific semantics of ditransitives with verbs of creation
and obtainment is better captured by the following more elaborate para-
phrase, adapted from Geeraerts (1998: 196): ‘Agent carries out a prepara-
tory action (involving patient), with a view to a subsequent transfer of pa-
tient to recipient’. This alternative paraphrase gives full justice to the two