Constructions with verbs of dispossession in Dutch A corpus-based case study
Martine Delorge, Timothy Colleman · 2006
This paper focuses on the constructional possibilities of verbs of reception and dispossession in Dutch. These verb classes have received considerably less linguistic attention than their counterparts among the verbs of transfer of possession, the verbs of giving. In this paper, we intend to show, however, that reception and dispossession verbs constitute an interesting area of investigation as well, by laying bare the constructional variation they display, both synchronically and diachronically. The first part of our paper provides a brief overview of this variation. In the second part, we present a case study of six typical verbs of dispossession: the simplex verbs stelen ‘steal ’ and roven ‘rob ’ and their be- and ont- prefixed variants, bestelen, beroven, ontroven and ontstelen. Their use will be examined in corpora of Middle, 19th Century and present-day Dutch.