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The Lexicon–Syntax Interface: Perspectives from South Asian languages
Edited by Pritha Chandra and Richa Srishti
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 209] 2014
► pp. 127–148

Ditransitive structures in Hindi/Urdu

| Northeastern University

This chapter makes the following two language specific claims; (a) Hindi/Urdu involves two types of ditransitive constructions, corresponding to the prepositional dative constructions and the double object constructions as in languages like English, and (b) the two constructions are not derivationally connected, and are a result of two distinct ditransitive verbs in Hindi/Urdu, namely the “send” type verbs and the “show” type verbs. The two types of verbs have different argument structures and as a consequence two different verb phrase structures. The difference between the two types of verbs however doesn’t get reflected in the word – order in Hindi/Urdu because of the feature-driven movement of the objects to the edge of the vP.

Keywords: ditransitives, hierarchical relation, Hindi/Urdu, thematic structure, VP-structure
Published online: 25 March 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.209.06mal
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