Unlike many other languages, English has three ditransitive constructions; a prepositional one in which the recipient or beneficiary is marked by a preposition and two double object constructions, one in which the recipient precedes the theme and the other in which the theme precedes the recipient. The availability and use of these three constructions in different dialects of English has long been an issue of controversy. This paper offers actual corpus data relating to the distribution of the three ditransitive constructions in one English dialect, namely Lancashire dialect. It shows that in cases where both the recipient and theme are pronominal, the double object construction with theme > recipient order is not only possible but in fact dominant.
2022. Revisiting constraints on postverbal argument coding and linearization in English goal ditransitive constructions. Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT 10:2 ► pp. 7 ff.
Holmberg, Anders, Michelle Sheehan & Jenneke van der Wal
2019. Movement from the Double Object Construction Is Not Fully Symmetrical. Linguistic Inquiry 50:4 ► pp. 677 ff.
Vázquez-González, Juan G. & Jóhanna Barðdal
2019. Reconstructing the ditransitive construction for Proto-Germanic: Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic. Folia Linguistica 53:s40-s2 ► pp. 555 ff.
2018. ‘Give it him and then I’ll give you money for it’. The dative alternation in Contemporary British English. Research in Corpus Linguistics► pp. 15 ff.
Larson, Richard K.
2017. On “Dative Idioms” in English. Linguistic Inquiry 48:3 ► pp. 389 ff.
SHIBASAKI, REIJIROU
2017. <i>Morphosyntactic Change: A Comparative Study of Particles and Prefixes</i>. ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 33:2 ► pp. 591 ff.
2010. Variable Selection in Logistic Regression: The British English Dative Alternation. In Interfaces: Explorations in Logic, Language and Computation [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6211], ► pp. 87 ff.
[no author supplied]
2013. Ditransitive constructions. In Varieties of English, ► pp. 219 ff.
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