Verb disposition in argument structure alternations: a corpus study of the dative alternation in Dutch

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611 www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci

Verb disposition in argument structure alternations: a corpus study of the dative alternation in Dutch q Timothy Colleman Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium Received 27 September 2007; received in revised form 7 January 2008; accepted 8 January 2008

Abstract Semantic accounts of verb pattern alternations often rely on observations about ‘verb disposition’: the preference of verbs with particular lexical semantic characteristics for one of two competing constructions is taken as a clue to the semantic differences between the two constructions. For instance, it has been observed with regard to the English dative alternation that verbs of refusal such as deny and refuse are perfectly acceptable in the ditransitive construction but much less so in the so-called prepositional dative construction with to (compare They refused the convict a last cigarette with ? They refused a last cigarette to the convict); and this contrast has been presented as evidence for the hypothesis that the prepositional dative highlights the actual movement of the theme toward the receiver (e.g. [Goldberg, A.E., 1992. The inherent semantics of argument structure: the case of the English ditransitive. Cognitive Linguistics 3, 37–74]). This paper discusses the merit of verb disposition as evidence for semantic hypotheses about alternating constructions and presents the results of a corpus-based study of verb disposition in the Dutch dative alternation. On the basis of [Gries, S., Stefanowitsch, A., 2004. Extending Collostructional Analysis: a corpus-based perspective on alternations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9, 97–129] method of ‘distinctive collexeme analysis’, the alternating verbs with a statistically significant preference for the Dutch ditransitive are separated from those with a statistically significant preference for the prepositional dative in a corpus of contemporary Dutch newspaper language. The results of this test provide the basis for a number of empirically valid generalizations about the semantic parameters driving the dative alternation. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Corpus linguistics; Dative alternation; Ditransitivity; Dutch

1. Introduction Semantic studies of argument structure alternations often rely on observations about verb disposition, i.e. about the lexical preferences of certain verbs for one of the two (or more) ‘‘competing” grammatical constructions over the other(s). The term verb disposition is borrowed from Stallings et al. (1998), who use it as shorthand q

The research reported in this paper is part of a larger research project ‘Meaning in between structure and the lexicon’, funded by a grant from the Ghent University Special Research Funds (B/05971/01). I would like to thank Bernard De Clerck, Magda Devos and five anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version. The usual disclaimers apply. E-mail address: [email protected] 0388-0001/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2008.01.001

594

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

for ‘lexical information concerning the frequency with which verbs tend to participate in particular syntactic constructions’ (Stallings et al., 1998, p. 396; also see Gries, 2007). For instance, with regard to the English dative alternation, i.e. the variation between the ditransitive or double object construction in the (a)-clauses below and the to-dative construction in the (b)-clauses, it has been observed that verbs of refusal such as deny and refuse are perfectly acceptable in the double object construction but much less so in the to-dative. Indeed, whereas in (1) both constructions are equally acceptable, the examples from Goldberg (1992) in (2) and (3) illustrate that refuse and deny prefer the double object construction over the to-dative. (1) a. b. (2) a. b. * (3) a. b. *

Ann gave Peter a book. Ann gave a book to Peter. She refused Joe a raise. She refused a raise to Joe. (Goldberg, 1992, p. 62) His mother denied Billy a cake. His mother denied a cake to Billy. (Goldberg, 1992, p. 62)

These observations fit in with – and as such lend added proof to – Goldberg’s general account of the semantic contrast between the double object construction and the to-dative in terms of ‘caused reception’ versus ‘caused motion’. While Joe in (2) and Billy in (3) can be construed as the projected recipients of a raise and a cake, respectively, they can hardly be construed as the goal at the end of a spatio-temporal path traversed by a raise or a cake: ‘[E]xpressions involving verbs of refusal (e.g., refuse, deny) cannot occur with prepositional paraphrases because they are not readily understood in terms of caused motion’ (Goldberg, 1992, p. 69). In this way, the preferences of verbs with certain lexical semantic characteristics for either the double object construction or the to-dative can be taken as clues toward the semantic differences between the two constructions. Section 2 discusses this common strategy of relying on verb disposition for evidence in somewhat more detail, providing additional examples from both English and Dutch. Section 3 presents the results from a corpus-based study of verb disposition in the Dutch dative alternation. On the basis of Gries and Stefanowitsch’s (2004) method of ‘‘distinctive collexeme analysis”, verbs with a statistically significant preference for the double object construction will be separated from those with a statistically significant preference for the Dutch equivalent of the to-dative in a corpus of contemporary Dutch newspaper language. While previous studies of the dative alternation are usually based exclusively on the linguist’s own intuitions, and consequently run the risk of misjudging the possibilities of certain verbs and/or of overlooking counterexamples to the advanced semantic generalizations, the results of this corpus-based test provide the basis for a number of empirically valid generalizations about the semantics of the dative alternation in Dutch. Section 4 provides a detailed discussion of a number of such semantic generalizations and Section 5 summarizes the main findings. It should be stressed at this point that the present study is not aimed at providing an exhaustive account of the various parameters driving the (Dutch) dative alternation. While the alternation has been convincingly shown to be a multifaceted phenomenon, which involves, for instance, informationstructural and syntactic priming effects as important determinants as well (see Section 4.1 below for a number of references), this study zooms in on the semantic relation between the two constructions involved. Its main aim is to provide lexical evidence for, or for that matter against, introspection-based hypotheses about the semantic contrasts between the double object construction and its prepositional paraphrase found in the literature on dative alternation. It will do so on the basis of a systematic study of verb disposition, an approach which – as will be shown – also allows us to uncover previously unnoticed semantic determinants. 2. Verb disposition as evidence for constructional meaning 2.1. Some further examples The semantic relation between the constructions involved in the (English) dative alternation is a topic which has bedeviled scholars for decades and which has consequently been approached from a multitude of theoretical perspectives. Still, there are some central hypotheses which recur again and again, albeit under various theoretical guises, including the idea that the double object construction is somehow associated with a semantic core of ‘caused possession’ or ‘caused reception’ whereas the to-dative is associated with a semantic core of

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

595

‘caused motion’. Goldberg (1992, 1995) is definitely not the only author who has referred to the non-alternating behavior of negative transfer verbs such as refuse and deny as support for this hypothesis. Similar statements about this class of verbs of prevention of possession are to be found in Gropen et al. (1989), Panther (1997) and Krifka (2004), among others. For another example, concerning a different semantic hypothesis, consider the examples in (4) to (6), adapted from Wierzbicka (1986). Contrary to refuse and deny, communication verbs such as reveal, confess and announce are perfectly alright in the to-dative but not in the double object construction. (4) (5) (6)

a.* b. a.* b. a.* b.

Max Max Max Max Max Max

revealed his neighbour a secret. revealed a secret to his neighbour. confessed the priest his sins. confessed his sins to the priest. announced his parents his decision. announced his decision to his parents.

The incompatibility of these verbs with the double object construction is often attributed to the so-called Latinate restriction, a morphophonological constraint which excludes verbs of Latin origin – or rather, with a Latinate stress pattern – from the dative alternation (see e.g. Green, 1974, pp. 77–79; Oehrle, 1976, pp. 121– 125; Pinker, 1989, pp. 118–119), and for a recent rephrasal in generative terms, (Harley, 2007). Wierzbicka, however, does not accept this Latinate restriction as a plausible explanation, given the existence of many verbs of Latin origin which do occur in the double object construction (e.g. assign, promise, allocate, bequeath) and instead offers a semantic explanation. Her general hypothesis about the semantic contrast between the double object construction and the to-dative is that the former highlights the effect of the action on the human target participant (i.e., the recipient, beneficiary or addressee) whereas the latter highlights the effect of the action on the theme participant. Thus, the double object construction codes ‘action seen in terms of its effect upon [target participant] rather than in terms of its effect upon [theme participant]’ (Wierzbicka, 1986, p. 164). Again, this is definitely not an idiosyncratic hypothesis: other authors who have posited the construal of either the recipient or the theme participant as the main affectee of the agent’s action as (one of) the prime semantic determinant(s) of the (English) dative alternation include Langacker (1991, pp. 359–360), Newman (1996, pp. 61–68), Van Valin and LaPolla (1997, pp. 145ff) and Taylor (2002, p. 427). Wierzbicka (1986, pp. 157–158) quotes the observed incompatibility of reveal, confess and announce with the double object construction as lexical evidence for this general hypothesis (among other such observations). These verbs lexicalize a strong effect on their themes: if secrets are revealed, sins are confessed, or decisions are announced, these are crucially affected in ceasing to be secret, in coming into the open. There is of course a certain effect on the addressee of the message as well, in that s/he comes to know something, but the addressee is arguably affected to a much lesser extent than the theme. In this view, the impossibility of reveal, etc. to enter into the double object construction tallies well with Wierzbicka’s general semantic hypothesis: these verbs imply too strong an effect on their theme participants to be eligible for use in a construction which gives centre stage to the target person rather than the theme. Studies of the dative alternation in Dutch often quote evidence from verb disposition as well. The examples in (7) illustrate the Dutch alternation: just like in English, a variety of verbs of giving – as well as verbs from a number of other, semantically related verb classes such as verbs of sending or verbs of telling – can be used in either (i) a double object construction with two unmarked NP objects coding the recipient and theme participants, as shown in (7a), or (ii) a prepositional dative construction with an unmarked theme object and the recipient marked by a preposition, usually aan (cognate with German an, English on), as shown in (7b). (7) a. De man heeft ‘The man has b. De man heeft ‘The man has

zijn broer een boek gegeven/overhandigd/verkocht/aangeboden/beloofd. given/handed/sold/offered/promised his brother a book’ een boek aan zijn broer gegeven/overhandigd/verkocht/aangeboden/beloofd. given/handed/sold/offered/promised a book to his brother’

Just like the English to-dative, the Dutch prepositional dative construction with aan (henceforth: aan-dative) is often discussed in locative terms: the aan-dative is taken to highlight the material transfer aspect of the

596

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

portrayed event, i.e. the actual movement of the theme towards the recipient, whereas the double object construction profiles the involvement of the recipient and/or the resulting possession relation between recipient and theme. Recent analyses in this vein include Van Belle and Van Langendonck (1996), Janssen (1997), Van Langendonck (2000), Schermer-Vermeer (2001) and Duinhoven (2003). In support of this general hypothesis, Van Belle and Van Langendonck (1996) briefly discuss a number of generalizations about verb disposition. One of these observations concerns the strong lexical preference of particle verbs such as overleveren ‘hand over’, uithuwelijken ‘give in marriage’, afgeven ‘hand in’, doorgeven ‘pass on’ and uitreiken ‘present’ for the prepositional dative construction. These are ‘typical transfer verbs’ – with the particle denoting the path – and as such ‘are either preferably or exclusively construed with aan’ (Van Belle and Van Langendonck, 1996, p. 246). As illustrated by Van Belle & Van Langendonck’s examples in (8), the double object construction is (marginally) possible with a pronominal rather than a full NP indirect object only. The preference of this kind of verbs for the aan-dative will be illustrated with corpus data and discussed more elaborately in Section 4.4. (8) a.

Men heeft de schurk aan de politie overgeleverd. one has the scoundrel to the police handed over ‘They handed over the scoundrel to the police’ b. * Men heeft de politie de schurk overgeleverd. one has the police the scoundrel handed over (lit.) ‘They handed over the police the scoundrel’ c. Ze hebben me de schurk overgeleverd. They have me the scoundrel handed over ‘They handed me over the scoundrel’

Needless to say, the practice of relying on this kind of lexical evidence is not confined to studies of the dative alternation. Similar arguments have been offered in investigations of a wide range of other cases of two or more ‘‘competing” grammatical constructions, e.g. the variation between finite that-clauses and accusative-and-infinitive complements after verbs of opinion in English (Wierzbicka, 1988; Verspoor, 1990; Noe¨l, 2003, among others), the distinction between object complements with and without comme in French (Willems and Defrancq, 2000; Tobback, 2006, among others), and the variation between allative and ¨ stman, 2005), to name only a ablative content phrases after verbs of perception in Finnish (Leino and O few (cf. also the brief discussions of many English argument structure alternations in Levin, 1993 and the references cited there). 2.2. A theoretically and methodologically sound approach Do such observations about verb disposition constitute valid evidence in discussions of alternation phenomena? In an approach to language which takes seriously the idea that verb patterns such as the double object construction and the to-dative are linguistic items in their own right, with their own formal and semantic properties, they most certainly do. After all, such abstract verb patterns do not occur in isolation in real language, but always in combination with specific lexical items, which in terms of Goldberg’s (1995) seminal theory of argument structure constructions fill up the various constructional slots (i.e., the verb slot and the argument slots). If two such abstract constructions differ in meaning, this should be evident from their occurrence in natural language in combination with different kinds of verbs filling their V-slots, i.e. from the ranges of verbs which can fill their V-slots and from the frequency with which this occurs (or, for that matter, from their occurrence with different kinds of nouns filling their direct object slot, etc.). A recent paper by Bresnan and Nikitina (in press) – also see Bresnan et al. (2007) – seems to question the validity of evidence from verb disposition. On the basis of attested examples from the WWW, the authors show that a number of verbs which are frequently quoted as non-alternators in the literature do in fact occur in both the double object construction and the to-dative. One of their cases in point concerns the observation from Goldberg (1992) and many others regarding verbs of prevention of possession discussed above: the web examples in (9) illustrate that deny, for instance, can be used in the to-dative, contrary to Goldberg’s claim.

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

597

(9) a. Most grievances will involve only a dispute between the grievor and the employer. The employer has underpaid, or disciplined, or denied a leave to a teacher; resolution of the grievance does not impact directly on others. b. After all, who could deny something to someone so dedicated to the causes of international friendship and collaboration? (web examples quoted in Bresnan and Nikitina, in press) Bresnan and Nikitina conclude from the occurrence of such counterexamples that the semantic hypotheses about the dative alternation which observations about deny, etc. are generally taken to support – such as the popular ‘caused motion’ vs. ‘caused possession’ hypothesis – are in fact misguided. This conclusion, however, amounts to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Fair enough, when checked against sufficiently large text corpora, many of the introspection-based observations put forward in the literature on the dative and other alternations will be found to be overstated. Recent corpus-based work by Manning (2003) and Stefanowitsch (2006) has shown convincingly that configurations of verbs with argument structure patterns which are claimed to be ungrammatical in the linguistic literature often turn out to be rare rather than actually impossible. In the case of refuse and deny, one need not even turn to the WWW for ‘‘counterexamples”. The imaginative writing component of the British National Corpus, which totals 19.7 million words, contains 180 ditransitive versus 24 to-dative occurrences of deny, and 43 ditransitive versus 2 to-dative occurrences of refuse. In other words, while both verbs show a clear preference for the ditransitive, the alternative construction is definitely not grammatically impossible. However, if a particular verb is in principle eligible for use in say both the double object construction and the prepositional dative, but in actual language use turns out to occur far more frequently in the former construction than in the latter, or vice versa, this remains a very relevant observation which may serve as lexical evidence in discussions of the semantic relation between the two constructions in question. Needless to say, such observations become increasingly significant as more verbs with relatively similar lexical semantics are found to display the same constructional preferences. The above discussion has already hinted at the added value of a corpus-based approach to verb alternation phenomena, which allows the researcher to determine the exact strength of the constructional preferences of certain verbs for either of the constructions under investigation. The more verbs are included in the investigation, the more accurate the ensuing observations will be, as it becomes less and less likely that counterexamples to the advanced semantic generalizations are overlooked – a danger which, needless to say, looms large in introspection-based studies, as these are usually based on small samples of verbs only. The present study’s database consists of over 15,000 double object and aan-dative examples from a corpus of contemporary Dutch newspaper language, featuring 252 alternating verbs. On the basis of Gries and Stefanowitsch’s (2004) method of ‘‘distinctive collexeme analysis”, I will identify the verbs with a statistically significant preference for the double object construction and those with a statistically significant preference for the aan-dative in this corpus sample. The following section outlines this corpus-based method and documents the design of the Dutch database to which it is applied. Section 4 takes the results from the collexeme analysis as a starting point for an exploration of the semantic determinants of the Dutch dative alternation. 3. The design of the corpus-based study 3.1. Distinctive collexeme analysis Distinctive collexeme analysis is one of the family of the so-called collostructional methods developed in a series of papers by Stefan Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch (Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2003, 2005; Gries and Stefanowitsch, 2004), which are aimed at determining the degree of association between abstract constructions and the lexical items filling their constructional slots, or between lexical items occurring in various slots of the same construction. Distinctive collexeme analysis is specifically geared towards the investigation of ‘‘competing” constructions. The method computes the degree of association between one lexical item and two or more functionally similar constructions on the basis of the frequencies of the lexical item in question in each of these

598

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

constructions and of the overall frequencies of the constructions in the corpus sample. If this procedure is repeated for all lexical items occurring with the constructions in the corpus sample, the eventual output are two (or more) ordered lists of distinctive collexemes, i.e. of those lexical items which significantly prefer one of the investigated constructions over the other(s). A brief discussion of Gries and Stefanowitsch’s (2004) application of this distinctive collexeme analysis method to the alternation between the English double object construction and the to-dative will serve to further elucidate the method. Gries and Stefanowitsch’s study is based on the one-million-word ICE-GB corpus. Table 1 shows the observed frequencies of the verb give in the double object construction and the to-dative in this corpus, as well as the observed total frequencies of these two constructions with all other verbs (with the expected frequencies for each cell in brackets). If this 2-by-2 table is submitted to a distributional statistic test, the resulting p-value can be interpreted as a measure of give’s distinctiveness. Gries and Stefanowitsch generally use the Fisher exact test to this end rather than more well known distributional statistics such as Chi-square, a decision which is motivated in statistical terms in Stefanowitsch and Gries (2003, pp. 217–219). The p-value resulting from the computation of Fisher exact for the distribution in Table 1 is very small: p = 1.84E 120, which is of course well below all commonly used thresholds of statistical significance. This means that give is highly distinctive for one of the two constructions under comparison. A comparison of the observed with the expected frequencies shows that it is distinctive for the ditransitive: the observed ditransitive frequency of give is significantly higher than the ditransitive frequency that would be expected given a random distribution. By repeating this computation for each individual verb and interpreting the resulting Fisher exact p-values as a measure of distinctiveness (the smaller the p-value, the more highly distinctive the verb in question), the verbs occurring in the two constructions in the corpus can be ranked according to their distinctivity. Table 2 lists the distinctive collexemes of each of the two constructions, in decreasing order of distinctiveness; between brackets are the observed frequencies of each verb in the two constructions (ditransitive frequency: to-dative frequency). Since their main aim is to demonstrate the potential of their method through a series of brief case studies involving alternating pairs of constructions of various kinds, Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004) do not provide a very detailed discussion of the results in Table 2 but limit themselves to a number of brief comments. They point out, for instance, that the most distinctive collexeme of the to-dative, bring, which expresses ‘continuously caused accompanied motion’, perfectly matches the ‘caused motion’ semantics often attributed to the construction. Other highly distinctive to-dative collexemes include take and pass, two verbs which ‘also involve some distance between agent and recipient that must be overcome to complete the action’ (Gries and Stefanowitsch, 2004, p. 107), so the results in Table 2 provide some corroboration for the popular ‘caused possession’ versus ‘caused motion’ hypothesis. An unexpected outcome, however, is the preference for the to-dative of commercial transaction verbs such as sell, supply and pay: ‘This finding would have been difficult to anticipate since a commercial transaction frame seems to be semantically more compatible with the ditransitive; it involves a change of possession, but not necessarily a change of location (consider, for example, the context of selling a house)’ (Gries and Stefanowitsch, 2004, p. 107). We will advance a possible explanation for this distribution in Section 4.4 below. 3.2. The Dutch database While Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004) make a convincing case for the potential of distinctive collexeme analysis as a method for the investigation of phenomena such as the dative alternation, the data in Table 2 Table 1 The distribution of give in the ditransitive construction and the to-dative in ICE-GB (= Table 1 in Gries and Stefanowitsch, 2004, p. 102) give

Other verbs

Row totals

Ditransitive To-dative

461 (213) 146 (394)

574 (822) 1773 (1525)

1035 1919

Column totals

607

2347

2954

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

599

Table 2 Collexemes distinguishing between the ditransitive and the to-dative (=2 in Gries and Stefanowitsch, 2004, p. 106) Ditransitive (N = 1035)

To-dative (N = 1919)

Collexeme

Distinctiveness

Collexeme

Distinctiveness

give (461:146) tell (128:2) show (49:15) offer (43:15) cost (20:1) teach (15:1) wish (9:1) ask (12:4) promise (7:1) deny (8:3) award (7:3) grant (5:2) cause (8:9) drop (3:2) charge (4:4) get (20:32) allocate (4:5) send (64:113) owe (6:9) lose (2:3)

1.84E 8.77E 8.32E 9.95E 9.71E 1.49E 0.0005 0.0013 0.0036 0.0122 0.0260 0.0556 0.2131 0.2356 0.2942 0.3493 0.3920 0.4022 0.4369 0.5724

bring (7:82) play (1:37) take (12:63) pass (2:29) make (3:23) sell (1:14) do (10:40) supply (1:12) read (1:10) hand (5:21) feed (1:9) leave (6:20) keep (1:7) pay (13:34) assign (3:8) set (2:6) write (4:9) cut (2:5) lend (7:13)

1.47E 09 1.46E 06 0.0002 0.0002 0.0068 0.0139 0.0151 0.0291 0.0599 0.0636 0.0852 0.1397 0.1682 0.1809 0.4243 0.4267 0.4993 0.5314 0.5999

120 58 12 10 09 06

also illustrate that a one-million-word corpus is probably too small for a thorough study. For several verbs in Table 2, the joint frequencies of ditransitive and to-dative occurrences in the corpus are very small: grant, for instance, totals seven relevant attestations, drop five, allocate nine, etc., which may be considered as an insufficient number of attestations to give a reliable indication of the constructional behavior of these verbs. The present study is based on a 9-million-word sample from the newspaper component of the CONDIV corpus of written Dutch (Grondelaers et al., 2000). More specifically, the corpus selection consists of articles from the 1998 editions of three Dutch (NRC Handelsblad, De Telegraaf, De Limburger) and three Belgian newspapers (De Standaard, Gazet van Antwerpen, Het Belang van Limburg), each newspaper contributing about 1.5 million words. Since the CONDIV corpus is not syntactically annotated, it was not possible to automatically extract all occurrences of the ditransitive construction, let alone of the aan-dative. Nor is there another syntactically annotated Dutch corpus of sufficient size available which would allow the automatic retrieval of such patterns. So as to retrieve a maximal number of ditransitive and aan-dative instances, we therefore had to start out from a large set of verbs that have the potential to be used in these constructions. The data collection process consisted of two subphases. The first of these started from an exhaustive list of all verbs quoted in the recent literature (grammars, monographs, articles, etc.) as being able to occur in the double object construction and/or the aan-dative. All occurrences of these verbs were automatically extracted from the corpus and were then manually filtered and analyzed. This list includes both very frequent verbs with several thousands of relevant hits (e.g. geven ‘give’ with 2461 ditransitive and 939 aan-dative examples in the database) and very infrequent verbs which turned out not to occur at all in the corpus (e.g. doorbellen ‘phone through’ or toesmijten ‘throw towards’). While the database resulting from this first phase already contains large numbers of relevant instances, it may be felt to be inherently biased, in that the inclusion of a verb in the database depends on it being signalled earlier in the literature as a verb capable of entering in the double object construction and/or the aan-dative. To reduce the risk that potentially relevant instances were missed, the data gathering phase was complemented with a second sub-phase, in which two corpus samples of 0.5 million words each were manually skimmed to list all ditransitive and aan-dative instances with verbs which were not included in the original database. Finally, all instances of these verbs were automatically extracted from the remaining 8 million words of the corpus, and then manually analyzed, so that for these additional verbs as well we arrived at the total ditransitive

600

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

and aan-dative frequencies in the entire 9-million-word corpus. It should be added that while we opted for a collexeme analysis of the construction’s verb slot, this method can also be applied to any of the construction’s argument slots: a systematic study of the lexical material filling the direct object slots of both constructions, for instance, might allow for interesting semantic generalizations as well. This, however, lies beyond the scope of the present study. All in all, the database which was submitted to the distinctive collexeme analysis contains 11,116 instances of the ditransitive and 4949 instances of the aan-dative, featuring 252 alternating verbs. These frequencies exclude passive instances, so the observations in the following sections concern the alternation between the active variants of the double object construction and the aan-dative. The (invented) examples in (10) below illustrate the passive variants of the double object construction and the aan-dative, respectively. With regard to (10a), it can be observed that in Dutch, contrary to English, it is the patient rather than the recipient argument which occupies the subject position in the canonical passive variant of the double object construction. (10) a. De twee woordenboeken werden de professor overhandigd. ‘The two dictionaries were handed the professor’ b. De twee woordenboeken werden aan de professor overhandigd. ‘The two dictionaries were handed to the professor’ Such passive instances were excluded from this investigation because there seem to be additional factors at work in the alternation between the passive variants of both constructions (see De Schutter, 1993 for a preliminary study). A second exclusion concerns instances such as (11) below.1 (11) a. Via een vernuftig file-systeem kan de gebruiker aan iedere tekst eigen commentaar toevoegen. [NRC] ‘A smart file system enables the user to add comments of his own to each text’ b. In het woelige jaar ’68 besloten ze hun leven te wijden aan het evangelie en de noodlijdenden in de stad. [GvA] ‘In the turbulent year ’68, they decided to dedicate their lives to the gospel and to the needy in the city’ Toevoegen ‘add’ and wijden ‘dedicate, devote’ are just two of the verbs which can enter into the pattern with a theme direct object and a second object introduced by the preposition aan in Dutch, but for which the ditransitive construction is simply not an option at all. Colleman (2006) has shown that the construction with aan covers a wide region in semantic space, which only partially overlaps with the region covered by the double object construction. The examples in (11) represent uses which clearly fall outside this overlapping region. Since the present investigation is aimed at a study of the semantic determinants of the dative alternation, i.e. of the semantic factors which help to explain why speakers opt for either of the two constructions in situations where both would have been possible – or, perhaps more accurately phrased, where neither of them was a priori impossible – it is advisable to leave instances with verbs such as toevoegen and wijden out of the picture. This is not to say that the database only contains verbs which are actually attested in both constructions in the 9-million-word corpus. Verbs which happen to occur in one of the two constructions only in the corpus were included as well, provided that Google queries produced a sufficient number of examples from the WWW to allow for the conclusion that the other construction is at least marginally possible as well (as a rule of thumb, we set five good examples from various Internet sources as a lower limit for inclusion). The verb afstaan ‘hand over, cede, part with’ is a case in point: while in the newspaper corpus, it is attested in the aan-dative only, specialized Google queries return a number of entirely natural examples such as the ones in (12), which illustrate that the combination of afstaan with the double object construction is not impossible, given a suitable context. 1 The codes in brackets in these and all following examples from the CONDIV corpus refer to the newspapers included in the corpus: NRC = NRC Handelsblad, Tel = De Telegraaf, Lim = De Limburger, GvA = Gazet van Antwerpen, HBL = Het Belang van Limburg, Sta = De Standaard. In all quoted corpus examples, the relevant verb is in italics.

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

601

(12) a. HET gebeurde lang geleden, toen ik met een baby op een overvolle bus stapte. Ongevraagd kwam de chauffeur achter zijn stuur vandaan, monsterde even zijn bus en pikte er toen een puber uit die hij zonder veel omhaal sommeerde om mij zijn zitje af te staan. ‘It happened a long time ago, when I stepped onto an overcrowded bus with a baby. The driver unsolicitedly came out from behind the wheel, inspected his bus for a while and then picked out an adolescent and summoned him without much ado to give up his seat to me (lit. to cede me his seat)’ (De Standaard, 01/02/2005) b. Toen Derain op bezoek kwam, was hij verbijsterd bij het zien van het witte masker. Hij stond verstomd en bood mij twintig francs als ik het hem afstond. ‘When Derain came to visit us, he was baffled at the sight of the white mask. He was astounded and offered me twenty francs if I handed it over to him (lit. if I ceded it him)’ Of course, the distinction between marginally alternating verbs and non-alternating verbs is a gradual one. From a usage-based perspective, it is to be expected that in this regard, different speakers will draw the line at different points. We opted for a maximal approach and included all verbs in the database for which the Internet data show that at least some speakers use them in both constructions. 3.3. The results of the test The distinctive collexeme analysis was carried out using version 3 of Stefan Gries’ R-script for collostructional analysis (Gries, 2004). Of the 252 verbs entered in the test, 131 turn out to significantly prefer one of the two constructions over the other: 58 verbs are significantly attracted to the aan-dative at the 0.05 level of statistical confidence, and 73 verbs are significantly attracted to the double object construction. With the Bonferroni-corrected threshold value p < 0.0001984 (= 0.05/252), these figures drop to 38 and 37 significantly distinctive collexemes, respectively. Table 3 lists the top 30 distinctive collexemes of both constructions. English glosses are added to give a hint of the meanings of these verbs, some of which will be discussed in more detail in Section 4. It should be added that, in later work, Gries and Stefanowitsch have advocated the use of log-transformed p-values as a measure of the degree of association (see e.g. Gries et al., 2005, p. 648). However, to facilitate comparison with the results from Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004) in Table 2 above, Table 3 presents ordinary rather than log-transformed p-values. 4. Semantic generalizations 4.1. Preliminaries The results of the ditransitive collexeme analysis provide the basis for a number of empirically valid observations about the constructional preferences of dative alternating verbs, which corroborate or undermine existing, introspection-based hypotheses about the semantic determinants of the dative alternation in Dutch, or which point to previously unnoticed semantic determinants. The next subsections discuss a number of such observations. It should be stressed, however, that while this study focuses on semantic determinants of the dative alternation, we would not want to suggest that the alternation is driven by such subtle semantic contrasts alone. Other parameters which have been shown to play a role include the discourse-accessibility of theme and recipient, the length of the theme and recipient NPs, syntactic priming effects, etc. Studies dealing with one or more of these other parameters in English and/or Dutch include Erteschik-Shir (1979), Collins (1995), Arnold et al. (2000), Gries (2003), Melinger and Dobel (2005), Van der Beek (2005) and Bresnan et al. (2007). As it happens, some of the above examples illustrate the effects of these other parameters. In the second of Bresnan and Nikitina (in press) web examples with deny + to-dative quoted above, for instance, which is repeated here for convenience as (13), the speaker’s choice of construction is probably triggered by the difference in length between the theme and recipient NPs. Though deny might be better suited for the ditransitive construction semantically, the use of that construction in this particular case would result in the awkward linear order of a very long and formally complex recipient NP followed by a much shorter theme

602

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

Table 3 The 30 most distinctive collexemes of the ditransitive and the aan-dative Ditransitive (N = 11,116) Collexeme 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Aan-dative (N = 4949) Distinctiveness Collexeme

Distinctiveness

1.50825E 41 6.20424E 39 1.47229E 33 3.86704E 29 3.1632E 22 1.02886E 18 4.06366E 15 7.58034E 15 4.46547E 13

8.50714E 70 5.46332E 67 2.76578E 55 5.17703E 44 4.03865E 42 4.30889E 34 4.30889E 34 5.14409E 24 1.2934E 22

opleveren (284:3) ‘yield, earn’ verwijten (276:4) ‘accuse, blame’ leren (215:1) ‘teach’ bezorgen (335:25) ‘cause, deliver’ kosten (524:87) ‘cost’ aandoen (112:0) ‘do to, subject to’ aanraden (99:1) ‘advise’ voorhouden (88:0) ‘hold out to, present’ (kracht, luister, etc. ) bijzetten (77:0) ‘complement with, add’ 10. verzekeren (77:0) ‘assure, guarantee’ 11. gunnen (130:11) ‘grant, not begrudge’ 12. verzoeken (74:1) ‘ask, request’ 13. inblazen (65:0) ‘breathe into, infuse with’ 14. kwalijk nemen (65:0) ‘blame, take in stride’ 15. zeggen (264:47) ‘say’ 16. (zorgen) baren (63:0) ‘give sorrow to’ 17. beletten (56:0) ‘prevent, bar’ 18. (parten) spelen (55:0) ‘play tricks on’ 19. adviseren (75:3) ‘advise’ 20. verbieden (73:3) ‘forbid’ 21. toelaten (64:2) ‘allow’ 22. garanderen (49:0) ‘guarantee’

4.46547E 2.96391E 3.24207E 3.79569E 3.79569E 7.40281E 7.95594E 1.05977E 1.53393E 2.30883E 4.48381E 1.20758E 1.40972E

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

8.94484E 08 8.94484E 08 1.29427E 07 8.2054E 07 1.1822E 06 2.72579E 06 5.61714E 06 7.51953E 06

wensen (44:0) ‘wish’ wijzen (44:0) ‘indicate, show’ besparen (43:0) ‘spare’ wijsmaken (38:0) ‘make believe, put across’ beloven (126:20) ‘promise’ geven (2461:939) ‘give’ ontnemen (51:3) ‘take away’ omdoen (32:0) ‘put on’

13 11 11 11 11 11 11 09 09 09 09 08 08

1. overlaten (0:134) ‘leave, pass on’ 2. verkopen (39:204) ‘sell’ 3. leveren (28:162) ‘furnish, deliver’ 4. brengen (61:177) ‘bring’ 5. overdragen (1:84) ‘hand over, transmit’ 6. afstaan (0:65) ‘hand over, cede, part with’ 7. voorleggen (36:123) ‘present, submit’ 8.overmaken (6:59) ‘transfer, remit’ 9. doorgeven (9:61) ‘pass on’ 10. schrijven (36:92) ‘write’ 11. stellen (54:106) ‘pose (questions, demands, etc.)’ 12. betalen (63:111) ‘pay’ 13. uitdelen (1:39) ‘distribute’ 14. toeschrijven (7:49) ‘attribute’ 15. uitleveren (1:32) ‘extradite, hand over’ 16. overhandigen (34:70) ‘hand’ 17. verlenen (98:122) ‘grant’ 18. schenken (71:100) ‘give (as a present)’ 19. verhuren (1:27) ‘rent, let, hire’ 20. verklaren (10:39) ‘state, explain’ 21. doorspelen (3:25) ‘pass on, leak’ 22. (bekentenissen, etc.) afleggen (0:19) ‘confess, make a statement’ 23. afgeven (1:20) ‘give up, hand in’ 24. uitlenen (1:20) ‘lend out’ 25. toekennen (44:59) ‘ascribe, award’ 26. uitreiken (2:17) ‘give out, issue’ 27. uitkeren (6:22) ‘pay out, make over’ 28. bekendmaken (0:12) ‘make known, announce’ 29. slijten (0:12) ‘sell, palm off” 30. (verslag, etc.) uitbrengen (1:14) ‘report to, reveal’

1.05681E 21 2.06362E 20 2.19345E 19 2.88163E 19 1.42467E 18 9.36277E 16 1.74932E 14 2.13408E 14 5.25508E 14 2.92819E 13 2.43899E 12 1.8095E 10 1.87801E 10 8.57197E 8.57197E 2.20078E 1.71384E 2.55729E 7.23818E 7.23818E 7.32128E

10 10 08 07 07 07 07 07

NP. In the double object examples with Dutch afstaan ‘hand over, cede, part with’ in (12) above, by contrast, this constructional choice is probably triggered by the pronominality (hence, shortness and topicality) of the recipient NP. (13) After all, who could deny something to someone so dedicated to the causes of international friendship and collaboration? Obviously, the dative alternation is a multifaceted phenomenon. Still, while semantic factors definitely cannot account for all of the observed constructional variation, they do play an important role, as we hope to illustrate in the following subsections. 4.2. Communication verbs A first semantic observation concerns communication verbs. As is the case in English, the set of dative alternating verbs in Dutch includes a class of communication verbs, which can be split up into verbs of telling, verbs of teaching and verbs of showing. Table 3 shows that this broad class of communication verbs is well represented among the most highly distinctive collexemes of the double object construction: the top 30 includes verbs such as leren ‘teach’ (215 ditransitive versus a single to-dative occurrence in the database),

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

603

aanraden ‘advise, recommend’ (99:1), verzekeren ‘assure’ (77:0), verzoeken ‘ask, request’ (74:1), adviseren ‘advise’ (75:3) and wijsmaken (38:0) ‘make believe, put across to, fool into’. On the other hand, the strongest distinctive collexemes of the aan-dative also include a few verbs of communication, e.g. (bekentenissen, verklaringen, etc.) afleggen ‘confess to, make a statement’ (0:19) (lit. ‘to lay down a confession, a statement, etc.’), bekendmaken ‘make public, announce’ (0:12) and (verslag, etc.) uitbrengen ‘report to’ (1:14) (lit. ‘to bring out a report’). Also, there are communication verbs which turn out not to be highly distinctive for either of the two constructions but which alternate much more freely, i.e. for which the observed distribution of ditransitive and aan-dative occurrences does not differ significantly from the overall distribution of both constructions in the corpus. Examples of this latter category include vragen ‘ask’ (835:343), laten weten ‘let know, tell’ (132:51), tonen ‘show’ (70:31), meedelen ‘communicate’ (44:41), signaleren ‘signal, draw attention to’ (5:3) and antwoorden ‘answer’ (6:3). These findings suggest that Wierzbicka’s (1986) observations about the constructional preferences of different kinds of English communication verbs can be transferred to Dutch. Verbs such as aanraden ‘advise, recommend’, verzekeren ‘assure’, verzoeken ‘request, ask’, etc. can be considered as typically ‘‘addressee-oriented” communication verbs. The examples in (14) describe situations in which the sender of the message clearly wants to exert influence on the receiver’s future actions: the sender wants the receiver to do something, or to believe something and act accordingly. (14) a. Een deel van de brieven aan Dutroux komt uit ‘‘mystieke kringen” [. . .] die hem de lectuur van de bijbel als ultieme troost aanraden. [Sta] ‘Some of the letters to Dutroux come from ‘‘mystical circles” who recommend him Bible reading as the ultimate consolation’. b. We waren toch wel bang, maar die man heeft ons verzekerd dat we ons absoluut geen zorgen hoefden te maken. [Tel] ‘We were quite afraid, but that man assured us that we had nothing to worry about’ Verbs such as bekendmaken ‘make public, announce’ and (bekentenissen) afleggen ‘confess to’, by contrast, are rather ‘‘theme-oriented”: through the communicative act, the theme comes out into the open (cf. Wierzbicka’s discussion of the English counterparts announce and confess in Section 2.1). Verbs such as laten weten ‘let know, tell’ and meedelen ‘communicate’, finally, denote a more neutral transfer of information, which is neither particularly addressee-oriented nor particularly theme-oriented. In this way, the constructional behavior of these different subtypes of communication verbs corroborates the general hypothesis that the ditransitive construction highlights the effect of the agent’s action on the recipient participant whereas the prepositional dative highlights the effect on the theme participant. Of course, the constructional behavior of communication verbs may be affected by other semantic properties as well. The verb zeggen ‘say’, for instance, is among the top distinctive collexemes of the ditransitive construction (it ranks 15th in Table 3, with 264 ditransitive vs. 47 aan-dative instances), although it is not particularly addressee-oriented in the way aanraden ‘advise’ and the like are. This result, however, is largely due to a number of frequent more or less fossilized uses of zeggen with a near absolute preference for the ditransitive, such as iets/iemand vaarwel zeggen ‘to say goodbye to something/somebody’ and iemand niets/iets/. . . zeggen ‘to mean nothing/something/. . . to somebody, to be important or familiar’ (usually with an inanimate subject referent). Three-place expressions with a fixed theme NP often display a strong preference for the ditransitive construction rather than the aan-dative: the left column in Table 3 also contains a number of verbs which occur in such fixed combinations only, such as iemand zorgen baren ‘to give/cause somebody sorrow’ (lit. ‘to bear sb. sorrow’) and iets kracht/luister/glans bijzetten ‘to lend added strength/lustre/brilliance to something’. The example of zeggen ‘say’ shows that in interpreting the results from a collexeme analysis of a construction’s verb slot, one always needs to keep an eye open for ‘‘special” uses of the verbs under investigation, and for the possible effects of the lexical fillers in the other slots of the construction. Also, it shows that while on a macrolevel the dative alternations of Dutch and English may be driven by similar semantic considerations, this does not mean that on a microlevel any two verbs which may be considered as each other’s closest translation equivalents will be found to display the same constructional behavior. Zeggen’s closest English equivalent say does not even allow the ditransitive construction: many ditransitive instances with zeggen in Dutch will be translated with tell in English. For another example,

604

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

consider ask and its prototypical Dutch translation equivalent vragen. While ask is among the strongest ditransitive collexemes in Gries and Stefanowitsch’s (2004) study of the English alternation, Dutch vragen is among the verbs which are not significantly biased towards either the ditransitive or the aan-dative. However, the semantic range of vragen + aan-dative is much broader than that of ask + to-dative. Common aan-dative examples like (15) below cannot be translated with the to-dative in English: instead, English uses alternative constructions such as to ask NP for NP or to ask NP’s NP in such contexts. This partly explains why for vragen the proportion of aan-dative instances is much larger than the proportion of to-dative instances with ask. (15) a. De grondwet vereist dat het gerecht eerst toelating moet vragen aan het parlement als het een minister wil ondervragen. [Sta] ‘The constitution stipulates that the court first has to ask Parliament’s permission if it wants to interrogate a minister’ (lit. has to ask permission to Parliament) b. Van Hellenberg Hubar heeft nu nieuwe instructies gevraagd aan de enqueˆtecommissie. [Tel] ‘Van Hellenberg Hubar has now asked the rogatory commission for new instructions’ (lit. has to ask new constructions to the rogatory commission) 4.3. Verbs of refusal and verbs of allowing The second class of verbs to be discussed in some detail are verbs of refusal, i.e. verbs which express an act of ‘not-giving’ rather than giving (cf. also Section 1). In Dutch, the set of dative alternating verbs of this class is slightly larger than in English: apart from weigeren ‘refuse’ and ontzeggen ‘deny’, there is also onthouden ‘withhold, deny’, verhinderen ‘prevent’, beletten ‘bar, prevent’, verbieden ‘forbid’ and finally besparen ‘spare’, the latter differing from the other verbs in its implication of a positive effect on the deprivee. Just like refuse and deny in English (see the observations from Goldberg, 1992 in the introductory section), Dutch verbs of refusal consistently prefer the ditransitive construction over the prepositional dative. Several of them even rank among the most highly distinctive ditransitive collexemes listed in Table 3: beletten ‘prevent, bar’ (56:0), verbieden ‘forbid’ (73:3) and besparen ‘spare’ (43:0). The remaining verbs follow a bit further down the line, but still count substantially more ditransitive than aan-dative examples in the database: verhinderen ‘prevent’ (32:0), onthouden ‘withhold, deny’ (16:2), ontzeggen ‘deny’ (19:4) and weigeren ‘refuse’ (31:10). A further example is kosten ‘cost’ (524:87; 5th strongest ditransitive collexeme), which is a privative (i.e. ‘CAUSE to LOSE’) rather than an antidative (i.e. ‘CAUSE not to HAVE’) verb, but which can be classed together with weigeren ‘refuse’, etc. as ‘‘verbs of future not having”. The semantics of ditransitive cost is further elaborated on in Colleman and De Clerck (in press). (16) lists some ditransitive examples with verbs of this class. (16) a. Oekraı¨ne weigert Loekasjenko een bezoek aan de tien jaar geleden ontplofte kerncentrale van Tsjernobil. [Sta] ‘The Ukraine refuses Loekasjenko a visit to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which exploded ten years ago.’ b. [Tejero] werd door een deel van de onderling wantrouwige leiders van de staatsgreep gebruikt om generaal Armada de controle over het bezette parlement te onthouden. [Sta] ‘Tejero was used by some of the coup leaders who were suspicious of each other to withhold the control over the occupied parliament from general Armada (lit. to withhold general Armada the control over parliament)’ c. De Noor was teveel bezig Koers de doorgang te beletten. [Tel] ‘The Norwegian was too preoccupied with preventing Koers’s passage (lit. with preventing Koers the passage)’ Again, these verbs denote a situation where the agent’s act clearly affects the referent of the indirect object: the agent exerts control over the indirect object referent’s future actions in preventing him/her from doing something s/he would like to do or from getting something s/he would like to have. In addition, the theme in clauses with these verbs is usually an abstract right or commodity rather than a concrete entity which could

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

605

be thought of as being manipulated by the agent or as being sent along a path towards a projected recipient: beletten ‘bar, prevent’, verhinderen ‘prevent’, besparen ‘spare’ and verbieden ‘forbid’ can never be used with a concrete entity for a theme, and with the remaining verbs, such uses are rare (with onthouden ‘deny, withhold’, for instance, the theme is a more or less tangible object in 2 out of the 18 relevant instances in the database). In this way, the consistent preference of these verbs of not-giving for the ditransitive construction as opposed to the aan-dative provides additional support for both the hypothesis that the dative alternation is partly driven by affectedness considerations and the hypothesis that the presence or absence of a spatial transfer is a relevant semantic determinant, two mutually compatible hypotheses which are often mentioned in the same breath in the literature. Van Belle and Van Langendonck (1996), for instance, posit [+/ affectedness] (in their terminology [+/ involvement]) and [+/ transfer] as the two major determinants of the Dutch alternation (without, however, referring to the ditransitive preference of verbs of refusal in support). Verbs of allowing, which can be considered the positive counterparts of verbs of refusal, prefer the ditransitive as well. Like in English, this is a small class, consisting of the near synonyms toestaan (42:8) and toelaten (64:2) only, both of which can be glossed as ‘allow, permit, grant’ in English. Toelaten is listed among the top ditransitive collexemes in the leftward column of Table 3, toestaan is not in the top 30 but is still significantly attracted to the ditransitive construction (to be exact, it ranks 59th among the distinctive ditransitive collexemes). In the examples in (17) below, the projected recipient does get the permission to act in a certain way or to get something, contrary to the examples in (16) above. However, as in (16), it is of course the agent who is in control and whose decisions affect the projected recipient’s future actions. (17) a. Ik zal bij minister Vande Lanotte laten aandringen om de familie een verblijfsvergunning toe te staan omwille van humanitaire redenen. [HBL] ‘I’ll lobby with minister Vande Lanotte to grant the family a residence permit for humanitarian reasons’ b. ‘‘Nee, ik sta je geen derde termijn toe, Teusjan”, zegt hij tegen de CDjA-voorzitter die nog steeds bij de microfoon staat. [Lim] ‘‘‘No, I won’t allow you a third term, Teusjan”, he tells the CdjA-leader who is still at the microphone.’ Wierzbicka (1986, p. 161) discusses the English verbs refuse, deny and allow in largely similar terms. She relates the preference of these verbs for the ditransitive as opposed to the prepositional dative to the fact that these verbs ‘imply a specifiable and emotionally charged effect on [the projected recipient], without implying any specifiable effect on [the theme]’. 4.4. Particle verbs and the agent–theme relation Many of the most highly distinctive collexemes of the Dutch aan-dative listed in the right-hand column of Table 3 are particle verbs with one of the particles af ‘off’, door ‘through’, over ‘over’ or uit ‘out’. Relevant examples include overlaten ‘leave, pass on’ (0:134), overdragen ‘hand over, transmit’ (1:84), afstaan ‘cede, hand over, part with’ (0:65), overmaken ‘transfer, remit’ (6:59), doorgeven ‘pass on’ (9:61), uitdelen ‘distribute’ (1:39), uitleveren ‘extradite, hand over’ (1:32), doorspelen ‘pass on, leak’ (3:25), afgeven ‘hand in’ (1:20), uitreiken ‘give out, issue’ (2:17), etc. These findings confirm Van Belle and Van Langendonck’s (1996, p. 246) introspection-based claim that such verbs are ‘either preferably or exclusively construed with aan’, cf. Section 2.1 above. They label these verbs as ‘typical transfer verbs’ and adduce their constructional behavior as support for the general hypothesis that the aan-dative stresses the (spatial) transfer of the theme towards the recipient. Indeed, these verbs can be considered as inherently directional, with the particle denoting the path travelled by the theme on the instigation of the agent. The corpus examples in (18) either concern an actual spatial transfer of a concrete entity (a,b) or a transfer of an abstract commodity in which the combination of the particle and the aan-phrase can still be thought of as denoting the (metaphorical) path travelled by the theme (c,d).

606

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

(18) a. De derde postbode moest wel het geld dat hij op zak had afgeven aan twee overvallers, gewapend met een pistool. [GvA] ‘The third postman had to hand over all the money he was carrying to two robbers armed with pistols’ b. Wat Fasseur aantrof in het archief waren honderden brieven van Wilhelmina aan haar moeder Emma (. . .) Emma had ze voor haar dood in 1934 aan de directeur van het Huisarchief afgestaan met de restrictie dat zij pas 100 jaar na Wilhelmina’s geboortejaar (1880) openbaar mochten worden. [NRC] ‘What Fasseur found in the archive were hundreds of letters from Wilhelmina to her mother Emma (. . .) Before her death in 1934, Emma had handed them over to the director of the House archive, with the restriction that they should not be made public until 100 years after Wilhelmina’s birthyear (1880)’ c. Maar de arts heeft die informatie niet doorgespeeld aan het ziekenhuis. [GvA] ‘But the doctor has not passed on that information to the hospital’ d. De RMS werd op 25 april 1950 uitgeroepen, nadat de Nederlandse regering in 1949 de soevereiniteit had overgedragen aan de Indonesische president Soekarno. [Lim] ‘The RMS [Republic of the South Moluccas] was declared on April 25th 1950, after the Dutch government had ceded the sovereignty to the Indonesian president Sukarno in 1949’ It would be too strong a generalization, however, to state that all morphologically complex verbs with a spatial particle as their first element consistently prefer the aan-dative over the ditransitive. Counterexamples are manifold, including:  with the particle voor ‘for’: voorhouden ‘hold out to, present to’ (88:0), voorschotelen ‘serve up, put in front of’ (17:0), voorzetten ‘put in front of’ (6:0), etc.;  with the particle toe ‘towards’: toekeren ‘turn towards’ (32:0), toesteken ‘extend, hold out’ (18:0), toeroepen ‘shout towards’ (43:8), toestoppen ‘slip, give (discreetly)’ (12:0), toesturen ‘send towards’ (9:0), toeschuiven ‘push/slide across to’ (9:1), etc.;  with the particle in ‘in’: inblazen ‘breathe into, infuse with’ (65:0), influisteren ‘whisper in s.o.’s ear’ (6:0), etc.;  with the particle bij ‘near, by’: bijzetten ‘add to, complement with’ (77:0) and bijbrengen ‘teach’ (55:5);  with the particle om ‘around’: omdoen ‘put around’ (32:0) and omhangen ‘hang around’ (2:0);  with the particle aan ‘on’: aanreiken ‘pass, reach’ (12:2), aansmeren ‘palm off on’ (8:0), etc.;  with the particle op ‘at’: opdissen ‘dish up’ (5:0), opdringen ‘press on, force on’ (16:4), opsturen ‘send’ (10:2), etc. All of these verbs are either among the distinctive collexemes of the ditransitive construction or among the ‘‘neutral” verbs for which the observed distribution of ditransitives and aan-datives does not differ significantly from the overall distribution. They are, in short, definitely not among the verbs which significantly prefer the aan-dative: as shown by the frequencies in brackets, several of them are not even attested in the construction with aan at all in the corpus sample. And yet, these particle verbs are equally inherently directional as the previously discussed verbs: just like the examples in (18) above, the examples in (19) below express spatial or metaphorical transfers with the combination of the particle and the indirect object phrase denoting the path travelled by the theme. In (19a), for instance, the handcuffs end up ‘om de vrouw’ (‘around the woman’) as a result of the offenders’ actions. (19) a. De daders deden de vrouw handboeien om en sloegen haar volledig in elkaar. [Tel] ‘The offenders put handcuffs on the woman and beat her up completely’ (lit. around-put the woman handcuffs) b. De Duitse politieke partij ’Die Gru¨nen’ heeft het IOC dossiers toegestuurd over de campagne van Berlijn voor de Spelen van 2000. [NRC] ‘The German political party ‘Die Gru¨nen’ has sent the IOC some files on the city of Berlin’s campaign for the 2000 Olympic Games’ (lit. towards-sent the IOC some files)

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

607

c. Volgens regeringswoordvoerder Claudio Vera zijn de sociale spanningen in Chiapas voor een belangrijk deel toe te schrijven aan de ‘‘hoge verwachtingen en dwaze ideee¨n” die buitenlandse bezoekers de indianen influisteren. [Tel] ‘According to government spokesman Claudio Vero, the social tensions in Chiapas can be attributed for a major part to the ‘‘high expectations and silly ideas” that foreign visitors whisper in the Indians’ ears’ (lit. the silly ideas that foreign visitors in-whisper the Indians) d. Toch leek de 2-1 voorsprong genoeg voor de Brabanders toen Van der Ende in de 66e minuut Vriesde zijn tweede gele kaart voorhield. [Tel] ‘Still, the 2-1 lead seemed sufficient for the Brabantians when in the 66th minute Van der Ende presented Vriesde with his second yellow card’ (lit. when he fore-held Vriesde his second yellow card) To sum up, we can distinguish two subclasses of particle verbs displaying opposite constructional preferences, which indicates that the relevant generalization is not to be found at the general level of the particle verb, but at a lower level. Or, put differently, it indicates that while Van Belle and Van Langendonck’s (1996) observation about the natural preference for the prepositional construction of ‘typical transfer verbs’ goes a long way towards explaining certain subregularities, it should be rephrased in less general terms in order to be entirely adequate. There must be an additional semantic factor explaining why only some of the ‘typical transfer verbs’ prefer the aan-dative. The hypothesis I would like to put forward here is that the aan-dative preference of particle verbs of the former subclass is related to their lexical emphasis on the changing agent-theme relation. Indeed, the particle in verbs such as afstaan ‘hand over, cede, part with’, overdragen ‘hand over, transmit’, doorgeven ‘pass on’ and uitreiken ‘give out, issue’ seems to bring a sense of ‘separation’ to the meaning of the complex verb, a meaning component that is lacking from ordinary simplex verbs of giving such as geven ‘give’, schenken ‘give (as a present)’ or lenen ‘lend’. A speaker who selects for instance the verb afgeven ‘hand over/in’ to describe a possessional transfer event rather than the basic verb geven ‘give’, thereby focuses on the agent’s parting with the theme, or put differently, on the theme’s leaving the agent’s domain. The domain the theme ends up in need not even be specified: afgeven, etc. are also frequently used in simple monotransitive constructions without a recipient phrase, cf. (20) for a number of corpus examples. (20) a. Blankers-Koen: ‘‘In Finland had ik eens zilveren kandelaars gewonnen. Die moest ik bij thuiskomst op Schiphol afgeven, want die kandelaars waren meer dan honderd gulden waard.” [NRC] ‘Blankers-Koen: ‘‘In Finland I once won some silver candlesticks. These I had to hand in when I arrived home at Schiphol airport, because they were worth over a hundred guilders”’ b. De schildpad uit Florida (. . .) wordt ervan verdacht salmonellose te kunnen overdragen, een bacterie die buikloop en braken veroorzaakt. [HBL] ‘The Florida tortoise (. . .) is suspected to transmit Salmonella, a bacteria that causes diarrhoea and sickness’ c. Het lijkt wel of de spelers pap in hun benen hebben. Ze blijven die bal maar doorgeven, ook als ze zelf allang hadden kunnen schieten. [Lim] ‘It looks as if the players have got lead in their legs. They keep passing on the ball, even if they could have taken a shot on goal themselves’ In the above examples, the particle by itself indicates the path out of the agent’s domain travelled by the theme. If this monotransitive construction is complemented with a recipient phrase, as in the aan-dative examples in (18) above, this serves to further specify the theme’s path, by providing a destination. Similarly, in to-dative clauses with English particle verbs such as hand over or send out, the to-phrase can be thought of as providing a further specification of the path denoted by over or out, as illustrated in the instances in (21). (21) a. The driver was asked to hand over his license to the officer. b. We have been sending out invitations to relatives and friends.

608

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

The particle verbs of the second subclass, by contrast, are generally not used without an overt recipient phrase. With many of the example verbs listed above, the simple monotransitive construction exemplified for afgeven, etc. in (20) is downright impossible (e.g. voorschotelen ‘serve up, put in front of’, toeroepen ‘shout towards’ or inblazen ‘breathe into, infuse with’), with others it is a marked alternative largely limited to cases where the identity of the recipient is known from the context anyway (e.g. toesturen ‘send towards’, opdringen ‘press on, force on’). This signals that in clauses with verbs from this second large subclass of particle verbs, the path travelled by the theme is not sufficiently specified by the particle alone. To summarize, the verbs of the afgeven subtype focus on the agent end of the path (the theme’s spatial origin) whereas the verbs of the voorschotelen, toesturen, etc. subtype focus on the recipient end of the path (the theme’s spatial destination). In order to see why the lexical semantics of particle verbs of the afgeven type tallies better with the aandative than with the double object construction, we need to take the formal make-up of both constructions into account. In contrast to the ditransitive construction with its two unmarked NP objects, the Dutch aan-dative – just like the English to-dative, for that matter – can be considered to be a kind of ‘augmented monotransitive’ or ‘2 + 1’ construction. At the core of the aan- and to-dative is the monotransitive constellation of a subject plus a single nominal object, which encode the agent and the theme of the denoted event, respectively. There is a third argument, of course, but this is encoded as an NP in the complement of a spatial preposition rather than a bare NP object. It is widely accepted in cognitive and functional linguistics that direct term (i.e., subject or nominal object) status corresponds with special semantic/ pragmatic salience. Langacker (1991, p. 301) expresses this in terms of a spotlight metaphor: ‘I suggest that [subject and object] represent a separate dimension of organization, wherein certain participants are singled out for special prominence. Choosing a participant to be the subject or object is very much akin to focusing a spotlight on it’. That is, in conferring subject or object status on certain participants, speakers present these participants as those which play a central role in the profiled event, and thereby impose a particular perspective on the scene. In Goldberg’s version of Construction Grammar, arguments that are encoded as subject or nominal object are considered to be constructionally profiled: these are the core arguments that are centrally involved in the profiled event, with the possibly remaining arguments playing a secondary or peripheral role (cf. Goldberg, 1995, p. 49). It should be pointed out that there are other ways in which a participant can ‘stand out’ as well, for instance in constituting the most important new information in the clause, i.e. the ‘focus’ or the ‘comment’ in information-structural terms. This, however, is another kind of prominence than the prominence associated with subject or object status (see e.g. the distinction in Dik’s Functional Grammar between the syntactic functions subject and object, which serve to encode a particular perspective on the scene by identifying its major participants, and the pragmatic functions topic and focus, which are concerned with the relation between the information presented in a clause and the discourse context; Dik, 1997, pp. 247–269 and 309–338). Thus, in Construction Grammar terms, the prepositional dative constructions of English and Dutch contain two constructionally profiled arguments, viz. the agent and the theme, plus an additional non-profiled recipient argument: the construction highlights the agent and theme participants and their interrelation and backgrounds the involvement of the recipient participant. In the ditransitive construction, on the other hand, there is a defining constellation of a subject plus two nominal objects, adding up to three constructionally profiled arguments: the construction gives pride of place to all three participants and their interrelations. There is a parallel for this ‘2 + 1’ analysis of the prepositional dative in Kay (2005), who reanalyzes Goldberg’s causedmotion construction as consisting of a two-place causative construction augmented by an added path argument construction. In the literature on Dutch, there is a parallel in the work of De Schutter (1974, 1993), who also stresses the importance of the ‘agent–theme’ relationship in the semantics of the Dutch aan-dative. The consistent preference of particle verbs which lexically highlight the (spatial) separation between agent and theme for the aan-dative construction in Dutch, supports the hypothesis that the prepositional dative and the ditransitive differ with regard to the emphasis put on the agent–theme relation. The lexical semantics of afgeven ‘hand in/over’, etc. matches the proposed semantics of the aan-dative perfectly, while the verbs of the voorschotelen ‘serve up, put in front of’ and toesturen ‘send towards’ subtype, which focus on the end position of the theme, i.e. the recipient–theme relation, rather than on its leaving the agent’s domain, lend themselves better to the double object construction.

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

buy

sell

B (goods) 2 A (buyer) 1

B (goods) 2 D (seller) from

C (money) for

609

A (buyer) to

D (seller) 1 C (money) for

Fig. 1. The perspectives on the commercial transaction event lexicalised by buy and sell (from Fillmore, 1977b, Figs. 3 and 4).

For another corroborating observation, consider the constructional behavior of verkopen ‘sell’: with observed frequencies of 39 ditransitive instances versus 204 aan-dative instances in the database, verkopen is the second most distinctive aan-dative collexeme in the ranking in Table 3 above. This finding mirrors Gries and Stefanowitsch’s (2004) ‘‘unexpected” result for English sell, which was found to significantly prefer the prepositional construction as well (cf. Section 3.1 above). Now consider the traditional frame semantic analysis of verbs of buying and selling, as put forward in Fillmore (1977a,b), for example. Of the four major participants in a commercial transaction event – the buyer, the seller, the goods, and the money – buy lexically profiles the buyer and the goods, whereas sell lexically profiles the seller and the goods, see the representation in Fig. 1 (the symbols 1 and 2 in Fig. 1 refer to the grammatical relations subject and direct object, respectively). In other words, verkopen ‘sell’ focuses on the relation between the seller and his goods, backgrounding the new owner of the goods, which means that it is akin to the particle verbs of the afgeven type discussed above in lexically highlighting the changing agent–theme relation (cf. just like these particle verbs, verkopen is also frequently used without a recipient phrase, as is English sell). Seen in this light, the observed constructional preference ceases to be surprising: verkopen/sell fits the proposed ‘2 + 1’ semantics of the prepositional dative perfectly. The same explanation may serve, mutatis mutandis, for the aan-dative preference displayed by other commercial transaction verbs, such as leveren ‘furnish, deliver’ (28:162, 3rd distinctive aan-collexeme in Table 3) and betalen ‘pay’ (63:111, 12th distinctive aan-collexeme in Table 3). Note, however, that this explanation would not work for English supply, one of the other commercial transaction verbs found by Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004) to prefer the to-dative over the ditransitive (cf. Section 3.1). Supply, after all, can hardly be said to lexically background its recipient argument. However, the appearance of supply in Table 2 is unexpected in the first place, given the fact that this verb is often quoted as a verb which cannot be used in the ditransitive construction at all (together with such verbs as provide, entrust, furnish, etc., see e.g. Levin, 1993, p. 47). With supply, the unmarked alternative to the to-dative is the with-construction illustrated in (22) below rather than the ditransitive. The outcome of the collostructional test for this verb would read altogether differently if this third construction were taken into account as well (as is technically possible, cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2005). (22) His proud and wealthy parents supplied him with all the money he needed for the project. 5. Conclusions The previous section has provided lexical evidence for a number of semantic hypotheses about the (Dutch) dative alternation. The observed constructional preferences of selected verb classes for either the double object construction or the aan-dative illustrate the relevance of semantic factors such as the occurrence of a (spatial) transfer, the status of either the theme or the recipient as the primarily affected participant, and the emphasis on the (changing) agent-theme relation, the latter of which is a previously

610

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

unnoticed semantic determinant. At a more schematic level, all of these semantic considerations have to do with the relative weight accorded by the two constructions to various sub-events or sub-relations in the highly intricate three-participant events they denote. As stated above, I would not want to suggest that the dative alternation is driven by such semantic considerations alone. Nor is there any suggestion that these are the only relevant semantic considerations. On the contrary, a further scrutiny of the results from the distinctive collexeme analysis in Table 3 – or from a similar quantitative analysis of the lexical fillers of any of the other constructional slots, for that matter – might very well uncover other previously unnoticed semantic determinants. On a methodological level, I have illustrated the added value of an extensive corpus-based approach to the study of grammatical alternations: for generalizations about verb disposition to constitute valid semantic evidence, they have to be based on empirical data about the constructional behavior of large sets of potentially alternating verbs. References Arnold, J., Wasow, T., Losoncgo, A., Ginstrom, R., 2000. Heaviness vs. newness: the effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering. Language 76, 28–55. Bresnan, J., Nikitina, T., in press. The gradience of the dative alternation. In: Uyechi, L., Wee, L.H. (Eds.), Reality Exploration and Discovery: Pattern Interaction in Language and Life. CSLI Publications, Stanford. Bresnan, J., Cueni, A., Nikitina, T., Baayen, H., 2007. Predicting the dative alternation. In: Boume, G., Kraemer, I., Zwarts, J. (Eds.), Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation. Royal Netherlands Academy of Science, Amsterdam, pp. 69–94. Colleman, T., 2006. De Nederlandse datiefalternantie: een constructioneel en corpusgebaseerd onderzoek. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Ghent University. Colleman, T., De Clerck, B., in press. Accounting for ditransitives with envy and forgive. Functions of Language 15(2). Collins, P., 1995. The indirect object construction in English: an informational approach. Linguistics 33, 35–49. De Schutter, G., 1974. De Nederlandse zin: Poging tot beschrijving van zijn structuur. De Tempel, Brugge. De Schutter, G., 1993. Towards a cognitive analysis of the NP-PP variation in the indirect object in Dutch. Leuvense Bijdragen 82, 485–499. Dik, S., 1997. The Theory of Functional Grammar. Part 1: The Structure of the Clause. second ed.. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Duinhoven, A., 2003. Actieve en passieve indirect objecten. Een kwestie van analyse en synthese. Nederlandse taalkunde 8, 199–230. Erteschik-Shir, N., 1979. Discourse constraints on dative movement. In: Givo´n, T. (Ed.), Discourse and Syntax, In: Syntax and Semantics, vol. 12. Academic Press, New York, pp. 441–467. Fillmore, C., 1977a. The case for case reopened. In: Cole, P., Sadock, J.M. (Eds.), Grammatical Relations, In: Syntax and Semantics, vol. 8. Academic Press, New York, pp. 59–81. Fillmore, C., 1977b. Topics in Lexical semantics. In: Cole, R. (Ed.), Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, pp. 76–138. Goldberg, A.E., 1992. The inherent semantics of argument structure: the case of the English ditransitive. Cognitive Linguistics 3, 37–74. Goldberg, A.E., 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Green, G., 1974. Semantics and Syntactic Regularity. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Gries, S., 2003. Towards a corpus-based identification of prototypical instances of constructions. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 1, 1–27. Gries, S., 2004. Coll.analysis 3, R-script for collostructional analysis. Gries, S., 2007. New perspectives on old alternations. In: Cihlar, J., Franklin, A., Kaiser, D. (Eds.), Papers from the 39th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, The Panels, vol. II. Chicago Linguistics Society, Chicago, pp. 274–292. Gries, S., Stefanowitsch, A., 2004. Extending collostructional analysis: a corpus-based perspective on ‘‘alternations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9, 97–129. Gries, S., Hampe, B., Scho¨nefeld, D., 2005. Converging evidence: bringing together experimental and corpus data on the association of verbs and constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 16, 635–676. Grondelaers, S., Deygers, K., Van Aken, H., Van den Heede, V., Speelman, D., 2000. Het CONDIV-corpus geschreven Nederlands. Nederlandse Taalkunde 5, 356–363. Gropen, J., Pinker, S., Hollander, M., Goldberg, R., Wilson, R., 1989. The learnability and acquisition of the dative alternation in English. Language 65, 203–257. Harley, H., 2007. The bipartite structure of verbs cross-linguistically, or Why Mary can’t exhibit John her paintings. Presentation at the 2007 ABRALIN Congres in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, March 2007. . Janssen, T., 1997. Giving in Dutch: an intra-lexematical and inter-lexematical description. In: Newman, J. (Ed.), The Linguistics of Giving. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 267–306. Kay, P., 2005. Argument structure constructions and the argument-adjunct distinction. In: Fried, M., Boas, H. (Eds.), Grammatical Constructions: Back to the Roots. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 71–98. Krifka, M., 2004. Semantic and pragmatic conditions for the Dative Alternation. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 4, 1–32. Langacker, R.W., 1991. The Foundations of Cognitive Grammar Volume II: Descriptive Application. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

T. Colleman / Language Sciences 31 (2009) 593–611

611

¨ stman, J.O., 2005. Constructions and variability. In: Fried, M., Boas, H. (Eds.), Grammatical Constructions: Back to the Leino, J., O Roots. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 191–212. Levin, B., 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Manning, C., 2003. Probabilistic syntax. In: Bod, R., Hay, J., Jannedy, S. (Eds.), Probabilistic Linguistics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 289–341. Melinger, A., Dobel, C., 2005. Lexically-driven syntactic priming. Cognition 20, 1–10. Newman, J., 1996. Give. A Cognitive Linguistic Study. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Noe¨l, D., 2003. Is there semantics in all syntax? The case of accusative and infinitive constructions vs. that-clauses. In: Rohdenburg, G., Mondorf, B. (Eds.), Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 347–377. Oehrle, R.T., 1976. The grammatical status of the English dative alternation. Unpublished. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT. Panther, K.-U., 1997. Dative alternation from a cognitive perspective. In: Smieja, B., Tasch, M. (Eds.), Human Contact through Language and Linguistics. Lang, Frankfurt/M, pp. 107–126. Pinker, S., 1989. Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Schermer-Vermeer, I., 2001. Grammatica, lexicon en de dubbelobject-constructie in het Nederlands en het Engels. Nederlandse Taalkunde 6, 22–37. Stallings, L., MacDonald, M., O’Seaghdha, P., 1998. Phrasal ordering constraints in sentence production: phrase length and verb disposition in heavy-NP shift. Journal of Memory and Language 39, 392–417. Stefanowitsch, A., 2006. Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2, 61–77. Stefanowitsch, A., Gries, S., 2003. Collostructions: investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8, 209–243. Stefanowitsch, A., Gries, S., 2005. Co-varying collexemes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1, 1–45. Taylor, J.R., 2002. Cognitive Grammar. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Tobback, E., 2006. Les constructions a` attribut de l’objet et le marquage de la pre´dication Seconde, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Ghent University. Van Belle, W., Van Langendonck, W., 1996. The indirect object in Dutch. In: Van Belle, W., Van Langendonck, W. (Eds.), The Dative. Descriptive Studies, vol. 1. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 217–250. Van der Beek, L., 2005. Topics in corpus-based Dutch syntax. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Groningen. Van Langendonck, W., 2000. Semantic role configurations and syntactic patterns of the Dutch indirect object. In: Shannon, T., Snapper, J.P. (Eds.), The Berkeley Conference on Dutch Linguistics 1997: The Dutch Language at the Millennium. UPA, Lanham, pp. 79–92. Van Valin, R.D., LaPolla, R.J., 1997. Syntax: Structure, Meaning and Form. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Verspoor, M., 1990. Semantic criteria in English complement selection. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Leiden. Wierzbicka, A., 1986. The semantics of ‘internal dative’ in English. Quaderni di Semantica 7, 121–135, 155–165. Wierzbicka, A., 1988. The Semantics of Grammar. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Willems, D., Defrancq, B., 2000. L’attribut de l’objet et les verbes de perception. Langue Francßaise 127, 6–20.