Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch 195construction in English. Goldberg (1995) incorporates this view in her se-
mantic network model of the English ditransitive: she distinguishes a sub-
sense ‘Agent intends to cause recipient to receive patient’, which covers
ditransitives with verbs of creation (including preparation) such as make,
bake, sew, cook, etc. and with verbs of obtaining such as buy, get, find, etc.^1
The next subsection will show that in (standard Netherlandic) Dutch, the
semantic possibilities of the benefactive ditransitive are (even) more limited
than in English.
Before we proceed to a discussion of the Dutch construction and its lec-
tal variation, however, it should be pointed out that the English construc-
tion has been shown to be subject to a certain degree of intralingual varia-
tion as well. Allerton (1978) presents the findings from a preliminary
questionnaire study in which he asked fifty British university students to
judge a series of forty test sentences of the pattern “Could you V me NP?”.
While examples such as Could you pour me a cup of coffee? and Could you
paint me a picture? were accepted (virtually) unanimously and examples
such as Could you taste me this wine? and Could you teach me a class?
were quite consistently rejected, there were also a lot of cases which re-
ceived mixed judgments. Some of these are listed in (3), with the assess-
ment scores from Allerton (1978: 25) indicated between brackets.^2 The web
examples in (4), quoted in Fellbaum (2005:223), illustrate that such clauses
indeed occur in actual language use.
(3) a. Could you iron me these shirts? [76%]
b. Could you wash me the dishes? [54%]
c. Could you clean me the windows? [47%]
d. Could you open me the door? [25%]
(4) a. Well, the rest is his story? Honey, can you iron me a shirt?
b. You’re a good boy, Joe. Now get busy and wash me some dishes.
(Web examples quoted in Fellbaum 2005: 223)
Though the design of Allerton’s study results in assessment scores which
very probably hugely overestimate the acceptability of such clauses to the
average native speaker of British English, his results clearly indicate that
there is no clear-cut separation between possible and impossible benefactive
ditransitives. This can be related to the fact that the above “intended recep-
tion” constraint comes with a certain amount of inherent fuzziness, i.e.
whether a given event can be construed as involving intended causation of
reception is a matter of degree rather than kind. In (3a), for instance, the