200 Timothy Colleman
and reciprocal pronouns, within a span of five words to the left or to the
right (using the in-built search tool of the Corpus of Spoken Dutch and, for
the CONDIV-corpus, the WordSmith Tools concordancer, Scott 2004).^5
The overwhelming majority of hits thus obtained were clauses in which the
pronoun functions as the direct object, or in which the pronoun does not fill
an argument position of the relevant verb at all, so the results had to be
manually filtered to identify all instances in which the pronoun fills the
indirect object position of the ditransitive construction. Needless to say, this
procedure does not guarantee the retrieval of all benefactive ditransitives
with the selected verbs from the corpora. First, the indirect object can take
the form of a lexical NP rather than a pronoun, as illustrated in the Web
example in (10) with the object mijn pa ‘my dad’. However, the above-
mentioned studies of the benefactive ditransitive in local dialect varieties of
Dutch have shown that the construction is first and foremost combined with
a pronominal indirect object.
(10) ‘k was dit weekend om inkt geweest voor de epson die ik mijn pa voor
zijn verjaardag gekocht had ...
<forum.belgiumdigital.com/archive/index.php/t-47056.html>
‘This weekend I went to buy ink for that Epson printer I bought my dad
for his birthday.’
Second, the distance between the verb and the beneficiary object pronoun
can be larger than five words. For the aim of the present study, however, a
maximal distance of five words to the left or right was deemed sufficient, as
this should suffice to give a good indication of the distribution of the con-
struction over the various subcorpora.
The results from the three corpora are merged in Table 1, which shows
that the numbers of observed benefactive ditransitives are small. (For each
verb, the table lists the total number of occurrences and the number of be-
nefactive ditransitives.) Kopen ‘buy’ is the only verb with a fair number of
ditransitive examples, mainly from the Belgian subcorpora. In fact, in all
three investigated corpora, the proportion of ditransitive to other occur-
rences of kopen ‘buy’ is significantly larger in the Belgian subcorpus than
in the Netherlandic subcorpus; see Table 2 for the detailed results.