Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch 215To conclude, the examples in (30) suggest that in Netherlandic Dutch,
benefactive ditransitives still occur more freely in certain formal text gen-
res. It seems that the use of the ditransitive to encode non-contiguous
events of recipient-benefaction has become a marker of conservative lan-
guage in this national variety and that it is thus only tolerated in highly
formal and/or archaic registers. The exact size of its presence there will
have to be determined by research involving specialized corpora.
- Conclusions
The above has shown that present-day Dutch is subject to lectal variation in
the use of the ditransitive argument structure construction to encode events
which involve a beneficiary rather than a prototypical recipient as a third
participant. In earlier phases of the language, the ditransitive could encode
various subtypes of benefactive events. In everyday standard Netherlandic
Dutch, however, this benefactive use of the ditransitive construction is
heavily constrained. In addition to the “intended reception” constraint
known from the relevant literature on English, the Netherlandic construc-
tion is subject to a “contiguity” constraint, to the effect that it occurs with a
handful of verbs of food provision of the inschenken ‘pour’-type only. In
Belgian Dutch, which is generally taken to be the more conservative vari-
ety, the semantic possibilities are wider. Just like the corresponding English
construction, the benefactive ditransitive of Belgian Dutch can be produc-
tively combined with verbs of creation/preparation and with verbs of ob-
tainment to encode events of recipient-benefaction, though it has also been
shown that such uses are quite infrequent. In addition, we have seen that the
observed regional variation is complemented by register variation. Even in
Netherlandic Dutch, the benefactive ditransitive is still used with a certain
degree of productivity in text genres with a tendency for formal, archaic
language. All of this suggests that we are dealing with a process of semantic
retraction: the benefactive ditransitive constitutes a peripheral use of the
ditransitive construction which is in the process of disappearing from the
grammar, but at various speeds in the various varieties of the language.
On a more general level, the case of the Dutch benefactive ditransitive
illustrates that the semantic properties of abstract argument structure con-
structions can be subject to language-internal variation just like the seman-
tic properties of lexical items can. The incorporation of such patterns of
lectal variation in models of constructional semantics may prove an impor-