The semantics of the aan-construction in 16th-century Dutch : a semasiological and onomasiological approach

This article focuses on the semantics of the Dutch aan-construction NP V NP aan NP], for example, Jan geeft een boek aan Piet ('Jan gives a book to Piet') in the 16th-century. In modern Dutch the aan-construction is used as an alternative to the Dutch double object construction, but previous research suggests that the use of ditransitive verbs in the Dutch aan-construction is only a 16th-century innovation - this alternation is called the 'dative alternation'. However, it is not clear which ditransitive verbs initiated the dative alternation. Colleman (2010) believes that the first instances o... Mehr ...