Introduction 15of benefactive ditransitives in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch, six frequent
verbs of creation and obtainment were selected and searches were made for
benefactive constructions in three different corpora representing various
modes and registers of standard Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch. The re-
sults show that standard Belgian Dutch is more tolerant of the construction
than standard Netherlandic Dutch. Colleman concludes that for the ditransi-
tive to be possible in standard Netherlandic Dutch the preparatory act and
the actual transfer must be contiguous, if not simultaneous, subevents. The
semantic properties of abstract argument structure constructions can thus be
subject to language-internal variation just like the semantic properties of
lexical items.
2.3. Part three. Variation of lectal awareness and attitudes
The third and last part of the volume implies a thematic shift: topic-wisely
we now turn to issues that pertain to lectal variation in relation to categori-
zation, perception, awareness, attitudes, identities and acquisition. Within
this group of three papers, we may note a difference with regard to the tax-
onomical level at which linguistic variation is studied. Whereas the last
contribution deals with sound change in relation to attitudes within an ap-
parently uniform lectal community, in the first two chapters focus is on the
perception of lects perceived as whole units: language varieties in the form
of (prototype) categories with their corresponding social and linguistic
images, or social and linguistic stereotypes. In more specific terms, this
cluster of contributions examines the acquisition of lectal awareness, differ-
ing attitudes towards lectal varieties and differing attitudes towards a spe-
cific lectal variable.
In “Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype formation”, Gitte Kris-
tiansen presents the design and results of a set of experimental studies car-
ried out in order to examine lectal acquisition in young children. The aims
of the investigation were to determine the crucial stages at which young
children acquire receptive competence of lectal varieties at different levels
of specificity and discuss potential predictors of the success rate: when do
children acquire competence of lectal variation, at which levels of abstrac-
tion, and if such knowledge is experientially grounded, where does the
knowledge stem from? The first experiment assessed the degree of identi-
fiability of L1 accents in 150 Spanish children across three age groups. The
second experiment examined the degree of correct identification of L2 ac-