198 Timothy Colleman
c. ... dat hy hem de deur opende, en in een kamer voerde.
(N. Heinsius, De vermakelyken avanturier, 1695)
‘... that he opened him the door, and led him to a room.’d. [Ik] zal de deur aanwijzen, waarvoor zij mij de sleutel maken moet
(J.F. Oltmans, De Schaapherder, 1838)
‘I’ll point to the door for which she has to make me a key.’
On the basis of data from a corpus of literary fiction, Colleman (2002) con-
cludes that in 19th Century Dutch, the construction could still be combined
productively with verbs of creation and obtainment to encode events of
recipient-benefaction.
Second, even in present-day Dutch, the semantic possibilities of the
benefactive ditransitive are reported to be wider in a number of regional
varieties of the language. According to Haeseryn et al. (1997: 1165), (con-
strued) examples such as (9a) and (9b) below are typical of Southern Dutch,
i.e. of language varieties spoken in Belgium and in the southern provinces
of The Netherlands.
(9) a. De hoogleraar kocht zijn vrouw een gouden armband.
‘The professor bought his wife a gold bracelet.’
b. Mijn vrouw heeft me een trui gebreid.
‘My wife knitted me a sweater.’
(examples labeled as “regionally marked” in Haeseryn et al. 1997: 1165)
There have been a series of questionnaire and/or survey studies which cor-
roborate that such uses indeed occur in local dialect and/or regional sub-
standard varieties of southern, and as it happens also eastern, Dutch (see
Van Bree 1981, Cornips 1994 and Colleman and De Vogelaer 2003). The
present study looks into the possibilities of the benefactive ditransitive in
the two national varieties of the language, i.e. Netherlandic vs. Belgian
Dutch.^ Dutch is the standard language of about 16 million speakers in the
Netherlands and about 6 million speakers in the northern part of Belgium
(the region of Flanders). Historically, the Netherlandic standard was also
adopted in Belgium. However, since the two speaker communities have
been part of separate political entities for the largest part of the last four to
five centuries, the Belgian variety of standard Dutch (which, in informal
parlance, is often simply referred to as Flemish) is characterized by a num-
ber of linguistic differences from the Netherlandic standard. Often, these
contrasts relate to characteristics of the southern Dutch dialect varieties