West Scandinavian ditransitives as a family of constructions: With a special attention to the Norwegian “V-REFL-NP'Construction”

Abstract

In this article we show that the semantic characterization of the English ditransitive construction, primarily based on the concept of transfer and generally assumed in the international literature within Construction Grammar, is insufficient for the remaining branches of Germanic, in particular for the West-Scandinavian languages, both modern and ancient. On the basis of our findings from West-Scandinavian we suggest eight semantic subconstructions of the ditransitive construction, which in turn can be divided into 17 different narrowly-circumscribed semantic verb classes. We depict the semantics of the construction on a semantic map, and lay out the internal structure of the construction on a lexicality–schematicity hierarchy where both higher-level generalizations and lower-level idiosyncrasies are captured. Finally, we investigate a specific subconstruction of the ditransitive in Norwegian, the V-REFL-NP construction, which shows certain idiosyncratic properties, not derivable from any general or specific syntactic rules of Norwegian, nor from the semantics of the individual parts. We conclude that a constructional analysis is needed to satisfactorily account for all the facts of the ditransitive construction in Norwegian and West-Scandinavian.