Constructions in Contact by Boas Hans C.;Höder Steffen; & Steffen Höder

Author:Boas, Hans C.;Höder, Steffen; & Steffen Höder [Boas, Hans C. & Höder, Steffen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2018-11-29T09:56:12+00:00

b.

Dit kan Afrikaanse universiteite ook ontsê van die oorsese finansiële bronne wat beskikbaar is om ’n gelykwaardiger opleiding vir almal in die land te bevorder. (Beeld 26/09/91)

‘This can also deprive African universities of the overseas funds that are available for enhancing equal education for everyone in the country.’

Such a scenario in which ont-verbs are increasingly used in other structural patterns than the ditransitive construction could arguably count as a case of distributional assimilation, too.

In Dutch, the ditransitive use of ontnemen (‘take away’) is not similarly under pressure, on the contrary: 3993 out of the 4220 three-argument instances of ontnemen culled from several large present-day newspaper corpora of present-day Dutch by Delorge, Plevoets & Colleman (2014) represent the ditransitive construction, which amounts to 94.6 %. In nineteenth-century data from the 1850 to 1899 volumes of the periodical De Gids, this was only 1023 out of 1720 instances, or 59.4%. In other words, in Dutch, instead of giving way to prepositional competitors, the ditransitive construction is increasingly becoming the only argument structure construction used with ontnemen (see Delorge, Plevoets & Colleman 2014: 45 and 53, for overview tables of the observed corpus frequencies, also for other Dutch ont-verbs).

The examples of distributional assimilation given by Gast & van der Auwera (2012) all involve cases where the semantic range of a grammatical marker is extended as a consequence of language contact. However, there is nothing that by definition rules out the reverse scenario: if the semantic ranges of two interlingually identified linguistic items are assimilated, this assimilation process may also involve the gradual loss of meanings or functions that are not shared between the two markers or constructions (cf. Gast & van der Auwera 2012: 386: “As a consequence, one or both of the signs may change their range of meaning, adopting part of the meaning covered by the sign from the contact language, or perhaps losing some of their original uses” [my italics, TC]). Applied to the presently discussed phenomenon: while, as is argued in Colleman & De Clerck (2011), ‘dispossession’ uses of the ditransitive construction are diachronically vulnerable anyway by virtue of their atypical semantics – the large majority of ditransitive clauses encode a transfer that proceeds in the canonical direction from subject to indirect object – the strikingly rapid decrease in relative frequency observed for ditransitive ontneem in Afrikaans may very well be partly due to the fact that such uses are not “backed up” by English ditransitive clauses with similar semantics – as we have seen above, the English construction does not accommodate volitional verbs of dispossession at all. Such an explanation would be consistent with the contrast observed between Afrikaans ontneem and Dutch ontnemen, i.e. the lack of a similar contact-related catalyst could explain why, in Dutch, ditransitive ont-uses are more resilient.

Another striking difference between Afrikaans and Dutch is in the form of the alternative construction. Not only is ditransitive ontneem giving way to a prepositional construction, it is giving way to a secundative construction with van marking the Theme, which is completely unattested with Dutch ontnemen.

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