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In this article we tackle the issue of diachronic variation in constructional semantics through an exploration of the (recent) semantic history of the well-established English ditransitive or double object argument structure construction. Starting from the assumption that schematic syntactic patterns are not fundamentally different from lexical items, we will show that -similar to the diachronic semantic development of lexemes -the semantics of argument structure constructions in general and that of double object constructions in particular, is vulnerable to semasiological shifts as well. More specifically, the analysis, which compares data from 18 th -century Late Modern English with presentday English, shows that the double object construction's semantic evolution presents a case of specialization, in which the construction has come to be associated with a significantly narrower range of meanings. It will further be argued that such patterns of semantic change are best captured in a model of argument structure semantics which discriminates between central and less-central or prototypical and non-prototypical uses.

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Comparing ( 't) schijnt to (zo) schijnt het (lit. 'so seems it'), the parenthetical use of the verb schij nen 'seem', we argue that ( 't) schijnt is best analysed as an evidential particle. Although both parenthetical and particle uses of schij nen have been subject to particulization, viz. grammaticalization towards particlehood, this grammaticalization path is bifurcated; while ( 't) schijnt is best accounted for by the matrix clause hypothesis, (zo) schijnt het fits the parataxis hypothesis and is less grammaticalized, not having reached particle status yet. The possible further grammaticalization of (zo) schijnt het into a more particle-like element is discussed on the basis of recent developments in Netherlandic Dutch, suggesting that distinct grammaticalization paths may lead to similar outcomes. This study calls attention to the need to allow for a certain flexibility of categories when considering cases of grammaticalization such as those affecting schij nen, bearing in mind that each individual instance of ( 't) schijnt or (zo) schijnt het can be more or less central to the idealized categories of matrix clause, parenthetical or particle.

In semantic studies of argument structure alternations as well as in recent psycholinguistic research on syntactic priming, the concept of alternation bias, i.e. the lexical preferences of individual verbs for one of two (or more) alternating constructions, plays a crucial role. This paper o¤ers a detailed comparison of the results from Colleman's (2009) corpus-based investigation of the dative alternation in Dutch with the findings from a series of picture description experiments reported in Bernolet (2008). On the one hand, this comparison reveals a striking contrast between both datasets in terms of the overall proportions of double object (DO) versus prepositional dative (PD) instances. On the other hand, it will be shown that the alternation biases of individual dative verbs are actually quite consistent across both the corpus and the experimental data, provided these are measured in a way which evaluates the observed frequencies for individual verbs against the overall observed frequencies in the respective datasets.