196 Timothy Colleman
shirts probably already belonged to the beneficiary before the event, so
there is no intended transfer of possession in the strict sense of the word. On
the other hand, however, something previously unavailable to the benefici-
ary would be made available to them as a result of the desired act, viz. some
ironed shirts, and it would seem that this suffices for some speakers but not
for others. It is perfectly possible that this variation within English (partly)
follows regional lines, but, to my knowledge, this has not been systemati-
cally investigated. We will briefly return to this observed lectal variation in
English below.
2.2. Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch
The Dutch ditransitive construction is exemplified in (5) below. Just like its
English counterpart, it combines a verb with a subject and two unmarked
NP objects which, in the prototypical case, code the recipient and patient
participants of a transfer of possession.
(5) Hij heeft de jongen een boek gegeven/overhandigd/verkocht.
He has the boy a book given/handed/sold.
‘He has given/handed/sold the boy a book.’
Many of the subsenses distinguished for the English construction in Gold-
berg (1995) have their parallels in Dutch. In addition to canonical acts of
giving, the construction can also be used to encode acts of prevention of
possession (with verbs such as weigeren ‘refuse’ and ontzeggen ‘deny’),
various kinds of projected possessional transfers (e.g. with verbs such as
beloven ‘promise’ or aanbieden ‘offer’), communicative transfers (with
verbs such as vertellen ‘tell’ and meedelen ‘communicate’), etc. We refer to
the above-mentioned studies by Geeraerts (1998) and Colleman (2009b) for
overviews of the Dutch construction’s semantic range.
One area in which this semantic parallelism between the English and
Dutch ditransitive constructions does not hold, however, is exactly in the
(im)possibility of encoding events of benefaction. The accepted view is that
in present-day standard (Netherlandic) Dutch, the benefactive ditransitive is
a very marked construction which is possible with a handful of rather infre-
quent verbs related to food provision or preparation only, such as (een
drankje) inschenken ‘to pour (a drink)’, (een bord) opscheppen ‘to dish up