202 Timothy Colleman
b. Mogelijk hebben de bouwvakkers hem een poets willen bakken.
[CONDIV_newspaper_NL]
‘Possibly, the construction workers wanted to play a joke on him.’The Web example in (11a) is a genuine benefactive ditransitive: it describes
an act in which the agent bakes something which is meant for the indirect
object referent’s consumption (and, presumably, benefit). The example
from the Netherlandic part of the Corpus of spoken Dutch in (11b), by con-
trast, does not refer to an actual act of baking the product of which is in-
tended for someone’s benefit, but involves the fixed ditransitive expression
iemand een poets bakken ‘to play a trick on somebody’ (the noun poets
does not occur outside of this expression in present-day Dutch). Obviously,
such idiomatic examples do not represent a productive use of the benefac-
tive ditransitive construction but belong in a category of their own (which
is why this bakken case is in parentheses in the Netherlandic column of
Table 1).
The single attested Netherlandic example of ditransitive halen ‘get,
fetch’ (12) occurs in an informal face-to-face conversation between two
speakers from the province of Gelderland, in the east of the Netherlands,
i.e. from one of the regions in which the ditransitive has been shown to be
more flexible in the local dialects. Throughout this conversation (session
code fn000969), the language of both speakers is characterized by various
regionally marked features, the occurrence of ditransitive halen being just
one of these.
(12) d'r zit ook nog een vaak een van die groene van die groene blaadjes moet
ik me d'ruit halen. [Corpus of Spoken Dutch_NL]
‘Also, there is ... often there is... those green... those tiny green leaves
which I have to remove from it (lit. which I have to get me out of it).’
In addition, the example in question is not a prototypical case of the bene-
factive ditransitive semantically, as the indirect object arguably does not
code a real beneficiary: the speaker describes the process of preparing bean
sprouts for consumption, which often involves removing green leaves from
the product, but this cannot straightforwardly be construed as an act of
(self)-benefaction. Probably, the example is better analysed as representing
another non-standard use of the ditransitive pattern attested in some eastern
dialects, in which an indirect object which is obligatorily coreferential with
the subject serves to underscore the subject’s agentivity (see Cornips 1994:
189–190 for related examples observed in Limburgian Dutch, and also see