Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch 199

which are still widely used in everyday speech by many Belgian speakers.

In the next section, we will investigate whether the wider semantic possi-

bilities of the benefactive ditransitive in southern dialects manifest them-

selves in the standard language of Belgian speakers as well.

3. Benefactive ditransitives in Belgian vs. Netherlandic Dutch:
   A preliminary corpus investigation

In order to test the distribution of benefactive ditransitives in Netherlandic

and Belgian Dutch, we selected six frequent verbs of either creation or ob-

tainment, viz. bouwen ‘build’, bakken ‘bake’ and tekenen ‘draw’ (creation),

and kopen ‘buy’, halen ‘get, fetch’ and bestellen ‘order’ (obtainment). None

of these belong to the small set of verbs of the inschenken ‘pour’ type which

can still be used ditransitively in the standard language according to the

norm found in recent grammars such as Haeseryn et al. (1997). However, it

is exactly with verbs from these two semantic classes, viz. creation and

obtainment, that the benefactive ditransitive can be productively combined

in many southern and eastern local dialect varieties, as shown in the above-

mentioned studies.

Three different corpora were used, representing various modes and reg-

isters of standard Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch:

• the newspaper component of the CONDIV corpus of written Dutch
  (Grondelaers et al. 2000), with texts from three Dutch newspapers add-
  ing up to 4.8 million words and from four Belgian newspapers adding up
  to 12.7 million words;


• the Usenet component of the CONDIV corpus of written Dutch, with 7.7
  million words of texts from Dutch discussion boards on the Internet
  (about various topics, including politics, sports, culture, etc., see Gron-
  delaers et al. 2000 for an overview) and 5 million words from similar
  Belgian boards;


• the Corpus of spoken Dutch, with 5.7 words of spoken Netherlandic
  Dutch and 3.3 million words of spoken Belgian Dutch, representing
  various genres (spontaneous conversation, business meetings, radio
  shows, etc.; see, e.g., Van Eerten 2007).

As there is no way to automatically extract all clauses with ditransitive syn-
tax from these corpora, I extracted all occurrences where a form of one of
the six test verbs is combined with one out of a set of 22 personal, reflexive