Danish to Dutch: retaining the recipient when a preposition disappears
The gift and its recipient occupy different roles
The Danish Language Council uses a sentence about sending a gift to explain why a pronoun after a preposition takes object case: Han sendte en gave til mig. The final phrase identifies the recipient, while the gift is the thing transferred. Dutch also distinguishes these roles, but a recipient need not always appear inside a prepositional phrase. Therefore the Danish til cannot be translated correctly just by demanding a matching Dutch word before every recipient.
The Dutch treebank documentation illustrates two arrangements with give: geef het boek aan haar and geef haar het boek. Both tell someone to give the book to her. The shorter arrangement places the recipient directly before the book without aan. This is not an instruction to give her as though she were the object being handed over. Her role comes from the entire construction.
A structural alternative is not a universal deletion rule
For a Danish instruction meaning “Give the book to her,” the attested Dutch alternatives explain why both a prepositional and a bare recipient can convey the transfer. They do not prove that every Danish phrase beginning with til can lose its preposition. A destination, a deadline, and a recipient are different relations even if Danish happens to use the same small word in some of their expressions. The target verb and the intended relation determine what constructions are available.
This distinction is particularly useful when Danish names two people. In a message meaning “She gives the book to him,” one participant is the giver and another receives it. The Danish subject/object pronoun contrast helps establish that allocation before the target words are reordered. The appearance of two Dutch noun phrases next to each other should not prompt an editor to swap them into the original Danish sequence. The recipient-first pattern with give is already a grammatical means of distinguishing their jobs.
Possession inside the transferred item is a further relationship
Danish can also mark whether a book belongs to the giver through sin, sit, or sine, which refer back to the sentence’s subject. Compare the meanings “She gives him her own book” and “She gives him another woman’s book.” Both have the same recipient and the same transfer, but different ownership. Deciding that Dutch can omit a recipient preposition settles neither who owns the book nor which possessive is appropriate.
A recipient phrase should consequently be separated in analysis from a possessive inside the item’s noun phrase. The Danish expression for “to her” names a participant in the transfer; the expression for “her book” describes the transferred item. Dutch can rearrange a recipient without converting that person into an owner. When the source includes an explicit contrast such as “to him, not to her,” the relevant information is which recipient is excluded, rather than the number of prepositions visible in the result. Preserve those participants and contrasts across the whole giving construction; a word-by-word alignment would obscure the very role the Danish preposition originally made clear.
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