The study investigates change in the use of the verb göra ‘make, do’ in the double object construction (DOC) and prepositional object constructions (POCs) with till and åt in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish prose fiction texts between 1800 and 1999. In both the Sweden Swedish and the Finland Swedish data, the use of göra in the DOC decreases in text frequency and inlexical richness (i.e. the number of nouns available as direct object). In the Sweden Swedish data, the use of POCs increases in the second half of the twentieth century. No such increase was found in the Finland Swedish data. In the nineteenth century, göra occurs mainly in the DOC as a light verb with abstract direct objects in both Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish, and only occasionally appears as a verb of creation with concrete direct objects. The decrease of göra in the DOC is concomitant with a general decrease in the use of göra as a light verb. In Sweden Swedish, göra in the åt-POC and till-POC is increasingly associated with concrete direct objects. The increase of the POCs in Sweden Swedish indicates that göra is more frequently used as a default verb of creation. The preposition åt is generally considered a “Finlandism”, being more frequent in Finland Swedish than in Sweden Swedish. The results of the study indicate no such tendency. It is possible that the scarcity of POCs in the late twentieth century Finland Swedish texts is due to the fact that Finland Swedish authors try to avoid Finlandisms.

This book presents the first major study of ditransitives in Swedish. Using a combination of well-established and innovative corpus-based methods, the book reveals considerable changes in the constructional behaviour of ditransitive verbs over the course of the last 200 years. The key finding is that the use of the so-called double object construction has decreased dramatically in terms of frequency, lexical richness and semantic range. This development is parallelled by a decisive increase in prepositional object constructions. The results are of high relevance to the ongoing debate within construction grammar on constructional productivity and on the nature of horizontal links.

This paper presents a study of the double object construction (DOC) in 19th‑ and 20th‑century Swedish, focussing on the semantic range of the construction. The results show that throughout this period, the Swedish DOC occurs with verbs of transfer (e.g. ge ‘give’), future transfer (erbjuda ‘offer’), dispossession (beröva ‘deprive’), hindrance (neka ‘deny’), communication (säga ‘say’), causation (förorsaka ‘cause’), creation and obtaining (laga ‘cook’, skaffa ‘obtain’) as well as verbs of attitude (avundas ‘envy’). Verbs of benefaction and malefaction (öppna ‘open’, spärra ‘block’) are found in the 19th‑century data, but do not occur in the DOC in present-day Swedish anymore. Over time, verbs of transfer have come to constitute the majority of the instances of the DOC, while most other semantic categories have undergone a decrease in token frequency, relative to the construction as a whole. These findings suggest that since the beginning of the 19th century, the Swedish DOC has undergone a process of semantic specialization, similar to the development of the corresponding constructions in English (Colleman and De Clerck 2011; Zehentner 2018) and Dutch (Colleman 2011). The study also reveals a decline in text frequency and overall type frequency of the DOC as a whole, indicating that the construction has become less productive over the last two centuries.