Transfer verbs with prepositional themes in English, Dutch and French: a contrastive analysis

While English, Dutch and French mainly resort to neutral alignment (e.g. double object constructions) or indirective alignment (e.g. prepositional dative constructions) to express transfer in three-argument structures, a more limited set of transfer verbs also allows for secundative alignment (with an unmarked recipient and a prepositional theme). The present paper explores the degree to which these patterns alternate with other ditransitive constructions and aims to lay bare interesting cross-linguistic differences on the basis of corpus analysis. The study reveals substantial differences in degrees of use and leniency in the three languages under comparison.

ISBN:9789038220321

Publication year:2012

Accessibility:Closed