Article published in:
Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy
Edited by Dylan Glynn and Justyna A. Robinson
[Human Cognitive Processing 43] 2014
► pp. 39–60

Competing ‘transfer’ constructions in Dutch

The case of ont-verbs

| Ghent University
| Ghent University
| Ghent University
This paper zooms in on the semantic relations between the constructions of “possessional transfer” (i.e. constructions used to encode events of possessional transfer) in Dutch by zooming in on a specific morphological class of dispossession verbs, viz. verbs with the prefix ont- ‘away’, such as ontnemen ‘take away’, ontfutselen ‘fish out of ’, onttrekken ‘extract, withdraw’, ontheffen ‘relieve’, etc. A database with several thousand attested ont-examples from various corpora of present-day written Dutch will serve as the starting point for an investigation of their constructional possibilities and preferences: the ont-verbs will be shown to cluster into a number of subclasses in terms of alternation possibilities. In addition, a comparison of these present-day Dutch results with data from a diachronic corpus of 19th century Dutch will reveal a number of lexico-grammatical shifts: the use of the double object construction and (especially) of the aan-dative with ont-verbs is more heavily constrained now than it was in earlier stages of the language.
Keywords: aan-dative, alternations, dispossession verbs, Dutch, ont-verbs
Published online: 06 November 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.43.02del
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Cited by 3 other publications

Colleman, Timothy
2018.  In Constructions in Contact [Constructional Approaches to Language, 24], ► pp. 143 ff. Crossref logo
Neels, Jakob & Stefan Hartmann
2018.  In Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar [Constructional Approaches to Language, 21], ► pp. 137 ff. Crossref logo
Zehentner, Eva
2021. Alternations emerge and disappear: the network of dispossession constructions in the history of English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 17:3 ► pp. 525 ff. Crossref logo

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