216 Timothy Colleman
tant contribution to the further development of Construction Grammar as an
overall theory of language.
Notes
* The research reported in this paper is part of the larger research projects
‘Meaning in between structure and the lexicon’ (BOF/GOA project nr.
B/05971/01, funded by the Ghent University Special Research Funds) and
‘Grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification’ (IUAP project nr. P6/44,
funded by the Belgian Science Policy). A travel grant from the FWO-Flanders
allowed me to attend the workshop on ‘Cognitive Sociolinguistics’ at ICLC10
in Kraków (15-20/07/2007). I would like to thank the convenors and partici-
pants in that workshop for their feedback and discussion, as well as Bernard
De Clerck, Dirk Noël and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on
an earlier version of this text. The usual disclaimers apply.
- Kay (2005) presents an alternative Construction Grammar analysis, analyzing
the benefactive ditransitive as a construction in its own right rather than a
subconstruction of the schematic ditransitive. The pros and cons of these two
positions need not concern us here.
- The scores should not simply be read as “accepted by N%” of informants.
Allerton asked his 50 informants to rate the sentences as “acceptable”, “mar-
ginal” or “impossible”. These assessments were weighted as 1, 0.5, and 0, re-
spectively, and the overall scores were converted to percentages.
- Note that, technically, Middle Dutch examples such as (8a) do not involve the
ditransitive construction (in its narrow sense of a construction with two zero-
marked NP objects) but rather its predecessor in Dutch grammar, viz. the con-
struction with accusative and dative objects (sinen here, for instance, is overt-
ly marked for dative case). The possibility to encode benefactive events with
this pattern, however, survived long after the case distinctions were lost.
- For a concise English introduction to the linguistic situation in Belgium and
the Netherlands, see, e.g., De Schutter (1994).
- This group of 22 pronouns consisted of: (i) the full and reduced object forms
of the personal pronouns of all grammatical persons, with the exception of the
3 rd person neuter form het ‘it’, i.e. mij, me, jou, je, u, hem, haar, ons, jullie,
hen, hun, ze; (ii) the weak and strong forms of the reflexive pronouns of all
grammatical persons, i.e. mezelf, mijzelf, jezelf, jouzelf, uzelf, zich, zichzelf,
onszelf and (iii) the reciprocal pronoun elkaar ‘each other’ and its informal
variant mekaar.
