Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch 211b. Ik kocht een pop voor mijn dochtertje.
‘I bought a doll for my daughter.’This is in line with our hypothesis that for the ditransitive to be possible in
standard Netherlandic Dutch, it matters whether the situation can be con-
strued as a single act of giving: a buying event in which both the buyer and
the beneficiary are present so that the beneficiary receives the object imme-
diately upon the commercial transaction, is not unlike the food provision
events discussed in the previous subsection in that there is a large degree of
contiguity, if not overlap, between the preparatory action and the actual
transfer. This motivates why the use of kopen ‘buy’ with ditransitive syn-
tax, though rarely attested, is not altogether impossible in Netherlandic
Dutch.
To end this section, note that the ditransitive kopen ‘buy’ clause in
(25a) denotes an event which is relevantly similar to prototypical acts of
giving event in another key way as well in that it involves the material
transfer of a concrete object. This seems to be another dimension of ditran-
sitive semantics (besides contiguity) in which Belgian Dutch is more flexi-
ble than Netherlandic Dutch. Without delving deeper into this matter, it can
be observed from the attested examples from the Belgian newspaper De
Morgen in (26) that next to the fairly prototypical obtainment and creation
events we have discussed so far, the ditransitive construction can also be
used to encode events of recipient-benefaction which involve abstract
rather than material reception in Belgian Dutch. The roepen ‘call’ event
described in (26a) obviously does not involve a material transfer of Hitler
to the coupists, nor does the bedenken ‘think up, devise’ clause in (26b)
denote the material transfer of a remedy.
(26) a. Een commando van de putschisten trok eerst naar het rijkspropaganda-
ministerie om Joseph Goebbels aan te houden, maar die zei doodgemoe-
dereerd dat hij hen Hitler aan de telefoon kon roepen.
[De Morgen 20/6/2004]
‘First, a squad of the coupists went to the Ministry of State Propaganda to
arrest Joseph Goebbels, but he told them dead calm that he could call Hit-
ler to the phone for them (lit. that he could call them Hitler to the phone).’
b. Wanneer je me daar een remedie tegen kunt bedenken wil ik de vol-
gende keer desnoods je snor trimmen. [De Morgen 28/10/2006]
‘If you can devise me a remedy for that, I am willing to trim your mous-
tache next time, if need be.’