The semantics of the <i>aan</i>-construction in 16th-century Dutch: A semasiological and onomasiological approach

Abstract

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 of the ditransitive use of the aan-construction are concrete physical movements of the direct object from the subject to the indirect object; however, he argues there is no quantitative proof to support those claims. In a self-compiled corpus of 16th-century Dutch, this article tries to find the evidence which is needed to underpin Colleman’s hypothesis by making use of the distinctive collexeme analysis and its diachronic variant. The results show that the first ditransitive instances of the aan-construction are indeed concrete uses, but that there is also an increase in the metaphorical use of the construction.

5. The emergence of the dative alternation in Dutch: towards the establishment of a horizontal link

“…A number of recent corpus-based studies have looked into the presence of the aan-dative in 16 th and 17 th century language in somewhat more detail, viz. Geleyn and Colleman (2015), Geleyn (2017) and Rens (2017). The major findings from these studies will be discussed in section 4.1 below.…”

“…The paper's overall aim is to document the extent to which, in 16 th century Dutch, the preposition aan 'on, to' was used to mark "dative-like" functions. Using a dataset of 16 th century aan-examples compiled in the framework of Rens (2017), I will first show that, in the first half of the century, the semantic overlap between the double object construction and the prepositional pattern with aan was still quite limited. Then, I will investigate the presence of the alternating constructions in three non-belletristic texts from the latter half of the century, viz.…”

“…The next two sections present the Dutch data analysis. First, section 4.1 re-evaluates data from Geleyn and Colleman (2015), Geleyn (2017) and especially Rens (2017), focusing on the question what exactly is to be gleaned from these existing datasets about the presence or absence of a full-fledged dative alternation in the early stages of Modern Dutch, i.e. in the late 16 th and early 17 th centuries.…”