Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch 203

Webelhuth and Dannenberg 2006 for an analysis of the Southern American

construction in He drank him a couple of beers in similar “agentivity”

terms). Compare with the semantically unproblematic example in (13), a

case of reported speech attested in a spontaneous telephone conversation

between Belgian speakers.

(13) Schat wil 'k ik u nog een jeneverke halen? [Corpus of spoken Dutch_B]

‘Darling, shall I get you another geneva?’

All of this suggests that Dutch verbs of creation and obtainment can be sub-

divided in three groups according to their compatibility with the benefactive

ditransitive construction:

• a small set of verbs related to food provision or preparation such as in-
  schenken ‘pour’, opscheppen ‘dish up, ladle out’ and bereiden ‘prepare’,
  which can be used with ditransitive syntax in both Belgian and Nether-
  landic Dutch;^7


• the verb kopen ‘buy’, which is sporadically used ditransitively in Nether-
  landic Dutch but to a significantly larger extent in Belgian Dutch;


• verbs such as halen ‘get, fetch’, bestellen ‘order’, bakken ‘bake’, bouwen
  ‘build’, etc., which are sporadically used with ditransitive syntax in Bel-
  gian Dutch only.

The latter group constitutes an open class: in principle, any verb of creation
or obtainment is eligible for occasional use in the benefactive ditransitive in
Belgian Dutch. By way of illustration, (14) below lists a number of attested
examples with verbs other than those listed in Table 1, from various Bel-
gian sources.

(14) a. Zijn er nog vaklui te vinden die je een zwaard smeden van echte

topkwaliteit? [De Morgen 20/08/2003]

‘Are there any craftsmen left who can forge you a top quality sword?’

b. Die week liep ik door heg en steg in de gele trui die mijn grootmoeder

me had gebreid.[Dimitri Verhulst, Dinsdagland]

‘That week I went walking in the countryside in the yellow sweater my

grandmother knitted me.’

c. Gorcha Davidova zocht zichzelf een leuk cadeautje voor haar verjaar-

dag. < http://www.delaatsteshow.be/dlsblog2/wordpress/?p=212>