Updating Old English Dative–Genitives: A Diachronic Construction Grammar Account

Abstract

This article conducts a corpus linguistics analysis of the dative–genitive subconstruction within the broader context of Old English double object complementation. The ditransitive construction in Old English has traditionally been perceived as a network of alternating subconstructions, including DAT-ACC, ACC-DAT, ACC-GEN, DAT-GEN, and ACC-ACC, as the most productive variants. Recent literature has primarily focused on DAT-ACCs and ACC-DATs because they are the most productive patterns across the history of English, giving also rise to the current ditransitive construction. However, the less productive case frames have received considerably less recent attention. This work, part of an ongoing investigation aimed at creating an OE DAT-GEN database, builds upon Visser’s list, verified and implemented by findings obtained from a search conducted in the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus. We obtain 88 verb types and 443 tokens, incorporating 19 new verb types and 260 tokens into the database. More significantly, we offer a detailed description of the conceptual domains and verb classes associated with OE DAT-GENs, which display a semantics characterized by the presence or absence of actual transfer, as well as transitions from literal to metaphorical transfer, with speech verbs playing a significant role.