210 Timothy Colleman
‘I’ve found an adapter at my local dealer’s now, but he needs it for him-
self and he is too lazy to order me one.’Obviously, the act of baking of a cake in (23) must be completed before its
product can be transferred to another person. Likewise, in (24), the action
the speaker desires from his local hardware dealer, i.e. ordering an adapter,
necessarily precedes the actual reception of this adapter by the speaker
(possibly even by a couple of days or even weeks).
So, in Belgian Dutch, the ditransitive construction is more flexible with
regard to the degree of contiguity required between the preparatory action
and the transfer and as such can be used to encode a larger array of events
of recipient-benefaction than the Netherlandic construction.^9 In fact, the
Belgian Dutch ditransitive parallels the English construction in this regard:
it is compatible with benefactive events as long as these involve an element
of intended reception. It should be noted, however, that this is not to say
that the benefactive ditransitives of Belgian Dutch and English are of equal
status. In Stefanowitsch and Gries’s (2003) collexeme analysis of the Eng-
lish ditransitive, two verbs of creation/preparation or obtainment, viz. buy
and cook, turn out to belong to the 30 verbs most significantly attracted to
the ditransitive construction, which suggests that the benefactive subsense
associated with such verbs is quite well entrenched within the overall net-
work of ditransitive subsenses. In Belgian Dutch, by contrast, the benefac-
tive ditransitive constitutes a peripheral, infrequent subsense, as shown by
the frequencies in Table 1: even kopen ‘buy’ is attested ditransitively in a
mere 1,27% of its occurrences in the Belgian subcorpora (see Colleman
2009b for further discussion). In other words, the benefactive ditransitive
covers a wider semantic range in Belgian Dutch than in Netherlandic Dutch,
but even in the former variety it is infrequently attested in actual language
use.
The observed in-between position of ditransitive kopen ‘buy’ – less
usual in Netherlandic Dutch than, e.g., ditransitive inschenken ‘pour’, but
not altogether impossible – is in accordance with the contiguity hypothesis
as well. In 1903, the Dutch grammarian Den Hertog briefly discussed the
semantic relation between (25a) and (25b) below, observing that the ditran-
sitive clause in (25a) suggests that the daughter was present at the buying,
while the voor-paraphrase in (25b) does not carry this suggestion (Den
Hertog [1903] 1973: 46).
(25) a. Ik kocht mijn dochtertje een pop.
‘I bought my daughter a doll.’