Beyond the dative alternation: the semantics of the Dutch aan-dative

One of the basic theoretical/methodological guidelines of Construction Grammar is that each construction should first and foremost be analyzed in its own right (cf. Goldberg 2002, inter alia). In accordance with this guideline, the present paper gives centre stage to the constructional semantics of the Dutch prepositional dative construction with aan, the nearest equivalent of the English to-dative. Existing accounts of this construction are always framed in the context of the dative alternation, i.e. they focus on the schematic semantic contrasts between the aan-dative and its “competitor”, the Dutch double object construction. The present paper takes a different perspective: the overall aim is to provide a usage-based analysis of the semantic structure of the aan-dative, following the multidimensional approach to constructional semantics outlined in Geeraerts (1998). The semantic analysis starts out from the list of significantly attracted verbs revealed by a collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries) of the lexical material filling the construction’s verb slot in a one-million-word corpus of contemporary Dutch newspaper language.