Benefactives

A benefactive is a grammatical construction that indicates the beneficiary of an action. This means the person or entity for whom the action is performed, or who stands to gain from it. Benefactives are not a distinct grammatical case in many languages but can be expressed through prepositions, verb affixes, or separate verb forms. For example, in English, a benefactive can be shown with the preposition "for," as in "I bought a gift for her." The action of buying is performed by "I," and "her" is the beneficiary of the gift.

Some languages have specific grammatical markers for benefactives. In many Indo-Aryan languages, for instance, a special verb form or auxiliary verb is used to express the benefactive. This can involve a causative construction where the person performing the action is the agent, and the beneficiary is also marked. The presence and form of benefactive constructions can vary significantly across language families, offering insights into how different cultures conceptualize and express the relationships between actions and their recipients or beneficiaries. Understanding benefactives helps linguists analyze sentence structure and the semantic roles of participants in an event.