PROCESSES OF TRANSFER
RECIPIENT AND BENEFICIARY IN PROCESSES OF TRANSFER
With processes that encode transfer – such as give, send, lend, charge, pay, offer and owe – the action expressed by the verb extends not only to the Affected but to a third inherent participant, the Recipient, as in:
Ed gave the cat a bit of tuna.
Bill’s father has lent us his car.
Have you paid the taxi-driver the right amount?
The Recipient is the one who usually receives the ‘goods’, permission or information. (With owe there is a ‘moral’ Recipient who has not yet received anything.) The Beneficiary, by contrast is the optional, not inherent, participant for whom some service is done. This often amounts to being the intended recipient. However, it is not necessarily the same as receiving the goods. I can bake you a cake, but perhaps you don’t want it.
This difference is reflected in English in the syntax of verbs such as fetch, get, make, buy, order and many verbs of preparation such as cook, bake and mix, which can be replaced by make. These can represent services done for people rather than actions to people.
Nurse, could you fetch me a glass of water?
Yes, but soon I’ll bring you your orange juice. I’ll get you something to read, too.
Semantically, both Recipient and Beneficiary are typically animate and human, while syntactically both are realized as indirect object. Occasionally an inanimate Recipient occurs as in: ‘We’ll give the unemployment question priority.’ An inanimate Beneficiary is possible, but unlikely: ?I’ve bought the computer a new mouse. Some become more acceptable with the prepositional alternative as in ‘I’ve found a good place for the magnolia.
The two syntactic tests for distinguishing Recipient from Beneficiary, namely passivization and the prepositional counterpart.
Recipient and Beneficiary can occur together in the same clause, as in the following example, which illustrates the difference between the one who is given the goods (me) and the intended recipient (my daughter): She gave me a present for my daughter.
Both Recipient and Beneficiary may be involved in processes of an unbeneficial nature such as they sent him a letter-bomb, in which him is Recipient; and they set him a trap in which him is Beneficiary.
