The benefactive role of a participant may be coded lexically by a verb; this may be illustrated from Chinese. Gěi starts out as a full trivalent verb meaning ‘give’ (a).

Secondarily, gěi takes the position of the second verb in a serial verb construction. In b, it still conserves its literal meaning, but can already be interpreted as marking the role of the third argument of the full verb sòng ‘present’. In a further step, gěi with its complement may be shifted to a position preceding the full verb. In c, it is desemanticized and just codes the benefactive role of its complement. In both b and c, the main verb is marked for aspect, while gěi goes without aspect marking, which is a symptom of its grammaticalization.

References

Langacker, Ronald W. 2003, ‘Constructional integration, grammaticization, and serial verb constructions’. Language and Linguistics 4.2: 251-278.

Newman, John 1996, Give. A cognitive linguistic study. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter (Cognitive Linguistics Research, 7).