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
Published online: 6 November 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.43.02del
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.43.02del
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
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Cited by (5)
Cited by five other publications
GRIES, STEFAN T.
Zehentner, Eva, Melanie Röthlisberger & Timothy Colleman
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