The case of ont-verbs: Competing ‘transfer’ constructions in Dutch

Delorge, Martine; Plevoets, Koen; Colleman, Timothy

doi:10.1075/hcp.43.02del

Part of

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

Martine Delorge | Ghent University

Koen Plevoets | Ghent University

Timothy Colleman | 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: 6 November 2014

https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.43.02del

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