Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch 207

First, consider the attested instances of inschenken and opscheppen used

in the so-called receptive or indirect-passive construction with krijgen ‘get’

in (18) (cf. the structurally and semantically similar kriegen/bekommen-

passive in German). Queries in the newspaper component of the Twente

News Corpus (years 1994-2001) for any form of the verb krijgen combined

with the past participle forms ingeschonken and opgeschept within a span

of five words to the right or to the left, revealed nine receptive instances

with inschenken and three receptive instances with opscheppen. Though

these are of course small numbers – which is unsurprising in the light of the

overall low frequency of the verbs in question – they suffice to show that

the attested examples in (18a) and (18b) are not one-offs. Many more in-

stances can be found on the Internet by Googling for strings such as kreeg

ingeschonken ‘got poured’ or krijgt opgeschept ‘gets dished up’.

(18) a. Wie melk uit een gekleurde fles kreeg ingeschonken, zou raar opkij-

ken. [Reformatorisch Dagblad 15/01/2000]

‘Someone who was poured milk from a coloured bottle (lit. who got

poured milk), would be much surprised.’

b. Niet iedereen ... zal erop staan dat hij zijn zabaglione ook daadwerke-

lijk uit een peperdure massief koperen zabaglionepan krijgt opgeschept.

[De Volkskrant 18/12/2001]

‘Not everybody will insist to be served his zabaglione (lit. to get dished

up his zabaglione) from an expensive solid copper zabaglione pan.’

As shown in (19), this construction is compatible with verbs of giving such
as overhandigen ‘hand’ or bezorgen ‘deliver’ as well as with closely related
verbs such as opsturen ‘send’ or aanbieden ‘offer’, but not with ordinary
verbs of creation or obtainment such as kopen ‘buy’, halen ‘get, fetch’,
bakken ‘bake’, etc.

(19) a. De jongen kreeg een boek overhandigd/bezorgd/opgestuurd/ aangebo-

den van zijn vader.

‘The boy was (lit. got) handed/delivered/sent/offered a book

by his father.’

b. *De jongen kreeg een boek gekocht/gehaald van zijn vader.

‘The boy was (lit. got) bought/fetched a book by his father.’

c. *De jongen kreeg een taart gebakken van zijn vader.

‘The boy was (lit. got) baked a cake by his father.’