Year: 2014
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: 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.
Source: Human cognitive processing
DOI: 10.1075/hcp.43.02del
Institution: Ghent University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4243460427