The semantic range of the Dutch double object construction

Abstract

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.