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Volume 18, Issue 1
  • ISSN 1876-1933
  • E-ISSN: 1876-1941
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Abstract

Two structurally unrelated constructions can affect each other’s realization through a process that has been called constructional contamination. According to this effect, lexemes participating in a grammatical alternation will deviate in their stochastic preference for an alternant if they appear frequently in a contaminating construction that is formally similar to the alternant in question. In the present article, we evaluate whether such contamination effects can also be found between two constructions in Dutch which share the same form, including the verb ‘to get’ and a past participle, but have distinct meanings (a “receptive” vs. a “resultative” meaning), and, if so, whether these effects occur in both directions. We zoom in on word order differences: if and the participle appear in a verb cluster, both word orders are possible in the receptive -construction, while, for the resultative -construction, the order with preceding the participle is reported to be ungrammatical in the grammatical literature but is not altogether absent from real-language corpora. Logistic regression analyses, based on data culled from the SoNaR-corpus, show that the word order in both constructions is indeed affected by constructional contamination, thus showing that this phenomenon can be bidirectional. Additionally, we demonstrate that these contamination effects differ between two national varieties of Dutch, viz. Belgian vs. Netherlandic Dutch, and we argue that contamination can sometimes also result in a disambiguating reflex. These results suggest that subtle differences in the organization of the constructional network can result in (partly) different contamination effects.

© John Benjamins Publishing Company
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2025-10-20
2026-05-14

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Constructional contamination between two constructions with krijgen ‘to get’ in Dutch
Constructions and Frames 18, 1 (2026); https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.24015.del
/content/journals/10.1075/cf.24015.del
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): ambiguity avoidance; bidirectionality; construction grammar; constructional contamination; constructional network; Dutch; national variation; verb clusters; word order variation

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