The semantic range of the Dutch double object construction

Just like its English counterpart (cf. Goldberg 1995), the Dutch double object construction is a prime example of a highly polysemous argument structure construction, with a basic ‘X causes Y to receive Z’ sense and several extended meanings which depart from the prototype in various respects and to varying degrees. This paper provides a corpus-based overview of the semantic structure of this construction, following the multidimensional approach to constructional semantics advocated in Geeraerts (1998). On the basis of Stefanowitsch & Gries’s (2003) “collexeme analysis” method, we will identify the verbs which most typically realize the investigated construction in a one-million-word newspaper corpus. These verbs will be shown to instantiate extensions along various dimensions of semantic variation. Several of these semantic extensions are paralleled in English, while others are not.

Published online: 10 December 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.1.2.02col