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In:Constructions in Contact 3: Constructional schemas and patterns in language contact
Edited by Hans C. Boas and Steffen Höder
[Constructional Approaches to Language 40] 2025
► pp. 179–207

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A French connection?

The presence of French loan verbs among the earliest dative-alternating ‘transfer’ verbs in Early Modern Dutch

 | Ghent University
Published online: 13 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.40.05col
Abstract
Building on earlier work on the diachrony of the Dutch dative alternation and on proposals by Ingham (2017; 2023) and Trips and Stein (2019) about French influence on the emergence of the dative alternation in English, this paper investigates the possible role of French-based loan verbs in -eren on the extension of the prepositional aan-dative in the course of 16th century Dutch. To this end, a test set of 94 -eren verbs was compiled which appear to have the “right” semantics for potentially occurring in the ditransitive constructions at stake and a four-step procedure was used for querying the 16th century sources (digitally) available for instances of these verbs in the double object construction and/or in the “new” pattern with aan. 22 verbs were identified that occur in both patterns. It will be argued that the import of such verbs brought along a substantial increase in the number of verb types shared between the two constructions and that, thus, French influence was a catalyst in the process leading to the establishment of a similarity link between them.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Building up to the establishment of a similarity link
  • 3.Prepositional datives as the result of grammatical
    replication/code-copying?
  • 4.A case study on -eren verbs
    • 4.1Methodology
    • 4.2Results
  • 5.Further discussion
    • 5.1Aan and à as interlingual equivalents
    • 5.2French influence as a catalyst
  • 6.Conclusion and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (43)
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