Ditransitive constructions in the world's languages:
alignment types, alignment splits, and inverse patterns

Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

In this talk I report on an ongoing cross-linguistic study of ditransitive constructions, based on over 200 languages. By "ditransitive constructions", I mean constructions of three-place verbs taking an agent, a theme and a (macro-)recipient (including addressee and benefactive) argument. I start with Dryer's (1986) observation that the grammatical behavior of recipient and theme is in many ways analogous to the behavior of (macro-)agent and (macro-)patient in monotransitive constructions, and I pursue the analogy further. The basic alignment types are defined by the argument-marking patterns, i.e. case-marking and indexing ("agreement") patterns (word order is largely ignored). Corresponding to the basic monotransitive types (accusative, neutral, ergative), there are three ditransitive types: indirective (treating theme like patient), neutral (treating both theme and recipient like patient), and sec¾ndative (treating recipient like patient). A further logically possible type (neither theme nor recipient treated like patient) is unattested. All types are found both in case marking and indexation, but case-marking heavily favors indirective alignment, whereas indexation favors sec¾ndative alignment. I will discuss explanations for the correlations, and I will show a world map of the different patterns, demonstrating that their geographical distribution is far from random. (This is based on a map forthcoming in the World Atlas of Language Structures, Dryer et al. (to appear).) Like monotransitive constructions, ditransitive constructions sometimes show animacy-based alignment splits. For instance, in Yimas and French first and second person pronouns show neutral alignment, whereas third person NPs show indirective alignment. Even more common are alignment splits depending on lexical classes of verbs, but other types of split which are attested in monotransitives (conditioned by tense/aspect or subordination) do not seem to occur. Again, I ask whether explanations proposed for monotransitive alignment splits can be extended to ditransitive alignment. Finally, I discuss a common type of ditransitive inverse pattern, where the "direct" construction, used when the recipient is higher than the theme on the person hierarchy (e.g. '(give) him to me'), cannot be used in the "inverse" situation, i.e. when the theme is higher than the recipient (e.g. '(give) me to him'), so that a different construction must be resorted to. Here too, explanatory models offered to account for monotransitive inverse patterns will be found useful for understanding the typological generalizations.

References
Dryer, Matthew S. 1986. "Primary objects, secondary objects, and antidative." Language 62: 808-845.
Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath & David Gil & Bernard Comrie (eds.) (to appear) World Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.