Benefactive ditransitives in Dutch 217- The total frequencies mentioned for each of the six verbs are estimates based
on the overall results of automatic searches for their infinitive and inflected
forms. - The overall frequencies of these verbs are too low to test this claim by means
of the same corpus method used for the verbs in Table 1. However, their
compatibility with the benefactive ditransitive even in Netherlandic standard
Dutch is uncontroversial, as shown by data from a larger corpus. Samples of
100 randomly selected inschenken ‘pour’ and bereiden ‘prepare’ occurrences
from the Twente News Corpus (henceforth: TwNC, a large corpus of contem-
porary Dutch newspaper texts) contained 27 and 25 ditransitive instances, re-
spectively. For opscheppen ‘dish up, ladle out’, a similar sample of 100 rele-
vant occurrences is less easily obtained, as the verb is used in the
synchronically unrelated sense ‘brag, boast’ in the overwhelming majority of
its occurrences, but specialized queries in the TwNC return a number of ex-
amples such as (i) below, which corroborate that such uses occur in Nether-
landic Dutch.
(i) Zijn moeder, een klein sherpa-vrouwtje met lange rokken, schept hem
troostend nog wat dhal bat op. [De Volkskrant 06/05/2000]
‘Comfortingly, his mother, a tiny sherpa woman in long skirts, ladles him out
some more dhal bat.’ - Google queries for any non-split form of the verb inschenken ‘pour’ imme-
diately followed by the preposition aan on 01/07/2009 illustrate this relatively
frequent occurrence with a respectable 23 contemporary examples of the con-
struction illustrated in (20). I have not been able to find similar aan-examples
with the verb opscheppen ‘dish up, ladle out’. It is reasonable to assume,
however, that speakers who find the inschenken examples in (20) acceptable,
will also accept aan-clauses with opscheppen. - This statement abstracts away from possible regional differences within Bel-
gian Dutch. Van Bree (1981) and Colleman and De Vogelaer (2003) have
shown that in regional dialects from the Belgian province of West Flanders,
for instance, the benefactive ditransitive is largely restricted to inschenken
‘pour’ etc., just like in standard Netherlandic Dutch. It is quite possible that
in their supraregional communication as well, speakers from West Flanders
will use fewer benefactive ditransitives, with fewer verbs, than speakers from,
say, East Flanders or Belgian Limburg. Testing this hypothesis is a topic for
future research. - Google queries (on 15/5/2007) within the domain .nl for all strings of any
form of bouwen immediately followed by one of the personal pronouns me
‘me’, hem ‘him’ or zich ‘oneself’ immediately followed by the indefinite de-
terminer een ‘a’ returned 41 ditransitive clauses of the kind illustrated in (30).