PREPOSITIONAL DATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH AND DUTCH: A CONTRASTIVE SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

This paper focuses on the so-called prepositional dative constructions in English and Dutch, i.e. on those 'transfer' constructions in which the theme participant is encoded as an unmarked NP object and the recipient is marked by a preposition (in contrast to the double object constructions of both languages, with unmarked NP theme and recipient objects). Though it will be shown that there are several prepositional dative constructions in both languages, the prime objects of study will be the constructions with to in English and aan in Dutch. The analysis will show that while to and aan are spatial prepositions by origin, their meanings have been extended to include a wide variety of recipient and addressee functions. Furthermore, the to-dative and the aan-dative behave relevantly similarly in the respective dative alternations. It will also be shown, however, that despite this large degree of semantic parallelism, the to-dative and the aan-dative do not cover exactly the same region in semantic space, which provides further proof for Hopper's (1991) Principle of Persistence.