204 Timothy Colleman
‘Gorcha Davidova was looking for a nice present for her birthday.’
(lit. searched herself a nice present for her birthday)
d. In plaats van na te denken over hoe wij onze toekomstige families een
dak boven het hoofd gaan verdienen en intussen onze ouders én grootou-
ders hun senseopads en transcontinentale reizen zullen financieren. [De
Morgen 20/01/2007]
‘Instead of thinking about how we are going to earn our future families a
roof over their heads, while at the same time our parents and grandpa-
rents will be financing their senseopads and transcontinental holidays.’To sum up, with regard to the lexical possibilities of the benefactive ditran-
sitive construction, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch are found to draw the
line at different places. The next section develops a hypothesis which ac-
counts for this observed regional variation in semantic terms.
- A semantic “contiguity” constraint
4.1. Introduction: English versus Dutch
Section 2 above briefly discussed the intralingual variation observed in
English with regard to the acceptability of clauses like (15c) below, which
relates to the inherent fuzziness of the often-cited “intended reception”
constraint. While the clauses in (15a) and (15b) fulfil this constraint per-
fectly, the ironing example in (15c) presents a borderline case, hence the
mixed judgements.
(15) a. Ala sewed me a dress.
b. Magda bought Wojtek a book.
c. ?Could you iron me these shirts?
Obviously, this intended reception constraint cannot, by itself, account for
the intralingual variation observed in Dutch. Though each of the examples
in (16) below denotes a situation in which the indirect object referent is
unmistakably involved as the intended recipient of the direct object referent,
they are all of different status: (16a) represents a use which is generally
accepted in both Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, while (16b) represents a
use which is regularly attested in Belgian Dutch but is marginal in Nether-