Graduelle Ditransitivität im Deutschen

What is it about?

This paper is concerned with syntactic and semantic properties of ditransitive constructions in standard and dialectal German. A higher or lower extent of ‘ditransitivity’ can be observed by means of these properties. Canonical ditransitives, for instance, vary by allowing (geben ‘to give’) or prohibiting (gönnen ‘to grant’) a contextual ellipsis of the dative object. In addition, whether the proto-patient is either a concrete or an abstract noun can change the ditransitivity of the same construction. Non-canonical ditransitives (which contain e. g. complex predicates, certain APs or PPs that expand the valency of transitive verbs, a so-called ‘free dative’, or a ditransitive adjective) often remain unattended by studies on ditransitives. But none of these patterns differ from canonical geben with respect to their syntactic and semantic properties. Finally, only light verb constructions whose objects are categorically restricted represent the divide between (non-)canonical and idiomatic ditransitives.

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Why is it important?

The 'free' word order in the German 'Mittelfeld' does not apply to all constructions containing two objects in dative and accusative case. My classification of ditransitive constructions helps to identify those instances that qualify for a study on object alignment in German.