gagnverkandi

Gagnverkandi is a term used in Icelandic linguistics to refer to the benefactive or beneficiary function of a verb or construction. The word is formed from gagn- meaning benefit and verkandi, the present participle of verka, roughly translating to “the one who does something for someone’s benefit.” In typological and descriptive grammar, gagnverkandi is the label given to expressions that indicate for whom an action is performed.

In Icelandic, the benefactive function is commonly realized with a dative noun phrase or pronoun that marks the recipient of the action. For example, in a sentence like Ég gaf honum bókina, the word honum marks the person who benefits from the action of giving. Here, the recipient/beneficiary is encoded as the gagnverkandi argument, distinct from the agent who performs the action and the patient or theme that undergoes the action.

The concept is used within broader discussions of semantic roles, valency, and ditransitive constructions. Gagnverkandi is one way languages encode who benefits from an event, and cross-linguistically benefactive arrangements can appear with different morphosyntactic realizations, such as dative marking, prepositional phrases, or other case or adpositional strategies. Scholarly treatments often compare gagnverkandi with related roles like beneficiary, recipient, or beneficiary-causer, highlighting how languages encode the same semantic idea in diverse syntactic forms.