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Ditransitive constructions with two human
non-agentive arguments
Anna Siewierska† & Eva van Lier*
1. INTRODUCTION
This paper addresses the issue of saliency from two different but related
perspectives: (i) as a notion relevant to particular referential properties of
arguments, dating back to Silverstein (1976), and (ii) as a notion referring to
non-prototypicality or counter-expectedness, as reflected in discursive
infrequency and formal markedness (cf. Landragin, this volume). These two
perspectives will be applied to the case of three-participant constructions.
A prototypical three-participant construction expresses an event of actual
physical transfer of an inanimate Theme (T) from a human agent to a human
Recipient or Goal (G), as in the following example from Dutch1:
(1) Ik geef ze de kranten
I give them the newspapers
‘I give them the newspapers.’
The two non-agentive arguments (henceforth NAAs) of a prototypical three-
participant construction differ from each other in animacy and, more generally,
in saliency: Whereas a typical T is inanimate and/or low in saliency, a typical G
is human and/or high in saliency (Malchukov et al. 2010a).
The topic of the present paper involves a major departure from this prototype.
In particular, it focuses on three-participant constructions in which both NAAs,
i.e. T and G, are highly salient, because they are both human. This is illustrated
in example (2), again from Dutch:
* University of Lancaster and University of Amsterdam. Courriel : E.H.vanLier@uva.nl.
We gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Science Foundation for the
EuroBABEL project Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax. The research reported on
in the present paper was carried out as part of this project. The paper is a posthumous
publication of Anna Siewierska.
1
Following Bickel (2011) we will use the abbreviation G to indicate the macro-role of
the Recipient-, Goal-, or Source-like argument in a three-participant construction,
independently of the exact semantic function of that argument. The other non-agentive
argument, the Theme, will be referred to with T.
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(2) Ze drukte de baby tegen zich aan,
she pressed the baby against her.REFL to
alsof iemand hem van haar wilde stelen
as.if someone him from her wanted steal.INF
‘She hugged the baby as if someone wanted to steal him from her.’
Several analytical dimensions underlie the prototypical status of a three-
participant construction such as in (1), and the non-prototypicality of the one in
(2). In particular, three-participant constructions with an inanimate T and a
human G are claimed to be overwhelmingly more frequent in discourse than
those in which T and G are both human (Haspelmath 2004). Importantly, the
saliency – understood here as counter-expectedness – of the latter event type is
reflected within and across languages by the use of morpho-syntactically more
complex constructions. In addition, some languages – depending on their way
of marking non-subject arguments – use such special expression strategies for
three-participant events with two human NAAs, in order to disambiguate the T
and G roles (Kittilä 2006). Another relevant issue concerns lexical effects on the
prototypicality status and morpho-syntactic expression of three-participant
events: Certain trivalent verbs may favour specific types of T and/or G
arguments, and/or may display preferences for specific construction types
(Haspelmath 2007, Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2008, Colleman 2009).
This paper evaluates the above observations with reference to three-
participant constructions with two human NAAs, on the basis of data from large
corpora of spoken and written discourse in three languages: English, Dutch, and
Polish. The specific research questions that we try to answer are the following:
(i) How often do three-participant constructions with two human NAAs
occur, relative to supposedly more frequent types of three-participant
constructions?
(ii) Which verbs take two human NAAs, and how often?
(iii) How are three-participant constructions with two human NAAs encoded?
(iv) How can we explain the attested patterns?
The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we present some
preliminaries: First, we discuss in more detail the above-mentioned relevant
claims from previous studies. Second, we provide methodological information
about the language corpora that we used, and the definitions that we applied
while querying them. Third, we introduce the basics of three-participant
constructions in the three languages under study. Subsequently, we present the
corpus data for English, Dutch and Polish, and answer the research questions
listed above. In the final section we draw some general conclusions.
2. PRELIMINARIES
2.1. Previous studies on (non-)prototypical three-participant constructions
Recent years have seen an increase in cross-linguistic research on three-
participant constructions (Siewierska 2003; Haspelmath 2004, 2007; Kittilä
2006, 2008; Siewierska & Hollmann 2007; Margetts & Austin 2007; Heine &
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König 2010; Malchukov, Haspelmath & Comrie 2010b). In this section we will
briefly review this research from our perspective, i.e. with a focus on three-
participant events with two human NAAs.
As mentioned in the introduction, Ts tend to be inanimate while Gs are
typically human. Animacy, however, is just one of a number of other features,
such as person and anaphoricity, which are also likely to pattern in Ts in the
opposite direction to Gs2. These features can all be subsumed under the
umbrella terms of saliency or topic worthiness. More specifically, prototypical
Ts are claimed to be inanimate, third person pronouns or full NPs, whereas Gs
are human, 1st or 2nd person pronouns.
Haspelmath (2004, 2007) distinguishes two types of scenarios that deviate
from the prototypical association of the macro roles T and G with specific types
and degrees of saliency3. First, a crossing scenario is one in which T and G each
have referential properties that are the opposite of the expected, so for instance
a human T and an inanimate G. The second type of deviation is a clustering
scenario, in which T and G have the same properties. This type can be sub-
divided into scenarios where both T and G display saliency properties that are
usually associated only with T (e.g. both are inanimate), and scenarios where
both T and G have G-like properties (e.g. both are human).
There is a cross-linguistic tendency to grammatically penalize the expression
of such non-prototypical three-participant scenarios, which has been termed the
Ditransitive Topicality-Role Constraint (Haspelmath 2004). The general claim
is that, since the deviant scenarios are less frequent than the prototype, the
former will be expressed by more complex constructions than the latter. In
relation to the concept of saliency, this increased morpho-syntactic complexity
or markedness can be understood as a means of highlighting the ‘abnormality’
of certain scenarios (Haspelmath 2006). In some languages this will be evident
only in the (maximally deviant) crossing scenarios, while others also show
formal effects for one or both types of clustering scenarios.
The focus of the present paper is on three-participant events involving a specific
type of clustering scenario, namely one in which T and G are both human. Kittilä
(2006) shows that the expression of such events yields potential ambiguity in
languages with so-called object-based marking of T and G4. Object-based marking
2 In fact, there are more potentially relevant features, such as definiteness and being a proper or
common noun. However, since these factors were not considered in our data analysis, we
presently leave them out of the theoretical discussion.
3 The term scenario refers to the configuration of referential properties of the
participants involved in an event (see Bickel 1995, Zúñiga 2006, and Witzlack-
Makarevich 2010).
4 There is a second, animacy-based coding strategy that yields potential ambiguity between T
and G in scenarios with two human NAAs. For instance in Maithili (an Indo-Aryan language
from India) human NAAs are marked with the dative, independently of their semantic role. In
this paper, we will not be concerned with languages that employ the animacy-based strategy.
However, this study forms part of a larger research project on Referential Hierarchies in
Morphosyntax, in which we focus on languages whose marking of grammatical relations is
strongly influenced by animacy/humanness. Unfortunately, the currently accessible corpora of
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means that T and G are encoded in the same way by virtue of being objects (or rather
non-subjects). For instance in Kikuyu (a Bantu language of Kenya), G and T are both
unmarked in constructions expressing prototypical three-participant scenarios, where
G and T are easily distinguishable on the basis of animacy (T is inanimate, G is
human). However, when G and T are both human, G must be marked by means of a
prepositional construction in order to differentiate it from T. As we will see shortly,
Dutch and English also employ an object-based strategy with unmarked T and G
arguments, in alternation with a construction type in which G is differentially
marked by a preposition.
A different possibility for marking T and G is the role-based strategy. This
strategy, attested for instance in Finnish, does not lead to ambiguity when T and
G are both human: T and G always have distinct marking (e.g. accusative
versus allative case) by virtue of having different semantic roles. Therefore,
there is no need to shift to a different construction type for the purpose of role
disambiguation.
However, this does not mean that only languages with object-based strategies
of NAA-marking show alternations between different types of three-participant
constructions. As we will see, Polish employs a role-based strategy, but displays
alternation with prepositional three-participant constructions as well. This
suggests that disambiguation between T and G is just one of various possible
motivations for the occurrence of alternations in the encoding of three-
participant events (see also Kittilä 2008).
In addition to the referential saliency properties of T and G, the lexical verb
may affect the encoding of a three-participant event. Even though most cross-
linguistic research focuses on prototypical events of ‘giving’ and in-depth
studies of other trivalent verbs or verb classes are mostly confined to well-
known Indo-European languages, the importance of the lexical factor is widely
acknowledged5. First, earlier studies suggest that certain verbs occur more often
with non-prototypical scenarios (Haspelmath 2004). Second, they show that
specific verbs may display preferences for specific construction types,
independently of the properties of their arguments (Bresnan et al. 2007;
Bresnan & Hay 2008; Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2008; Colleman 2009). Third,
it is suggested that subtle differences may exist between the subcategorizations
of cognate verbs in closely related languages (Colleman & De Clerck 2009).
Finally, there is supporting psycholinguistic evidence for the importance of the
lexical factor. Arai et al. (2007) show that syntactic priming of three-participant
constructions is lexically dependent: processing is speeded up only in the
condition where the primer and the target sentence contain the same verb.
In the remainder of this paper, we will further investigate the morpho-syntactic
expression of three-participant events involving two human NAAs. First, however,
we will present the methodological and linguistic basics of our study.
spoken discourse in such languages do not allow for the evaluations of claims based on
frequency of occurrence. This is an area for future research.
5 For a recent collection of case-studies of languages from all over the world, in which
different verb classes are discussed, see the contributions to Malchukov et al. 2010b.
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2.2. Method: corpora and definitions
The data presented in this study are extracted from the following corpora:
(i) For Dutch: the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (CGN) of 10 million
words;
(ii) For English: the British National Corpus (BNC) of 100 million words;
(iii) For Polish: the IPI PAN corpus of 250 million words and the sampler
PELCRA corpus of 14 million words6.
The Dutch corpus contains only spoken language, from different genres, such as
informal conversation, interviews, and parliamentary discussions. The English and
Polish corpora contain both spoken and written data, again from various genres.
We have queried these corpora in several ways, sometimes taking the lexical verb
(or lemma) as our point of departure and sometimes starting from the properties of
the NAAs. When querying specific verbs, the instances of trivalent usage of each
verb had to be separated manually from other usages of the same verb. For most of
the verbs considered the trivalent use was clearly not the dominant one (cf.
Mukherjee 2005 for detailed data on English). When searching for specific types of
arguments, such as pronouns, we manually removed any instances of pronouns
referring to participants other than the T and G.
Finally, it is important to note that our study takes into account only
constructions in which the T and G are expressed overtly. However, cases in
which the Agent argument remains unexpressed were not excluded from the
analysis. We consider T and G as arguments iff they are assigned their semantic
role by the predicate. This semantic approach to argumenthood, adopted from
Bickel (2011), allows for a unified analysis of argument roles, independent of
their grammatical treatment as what might traditionally be called a ‘core
argument’, an ‘oblique argument’, or an ‘adjunct’.
2.3. Expression of three-participant events in Dutch, English, and Polish
This paper studies the expression of three-participant events in Dutch,
English, and Polish. These languages are alike in that they exhibit (at least) two
different formal possibilities to encode such events. Dutch and English have the
so-called double object construction (henceforth DOC) and the prepositional
construction (henceforth PrepC), illustrated in (3a) and (3b), respectively7:
6 For various aspects of the corpora, the reader is referred to the following websites and
publications: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk, http://lands.let.ru.nl/cgn/, Hardy (in prep.),
Hoffmann et al. 2008, Przepiórkowski 2004, Waliński &Pęzik P. 2007.
7 Note that Dutch, unlike English, displays variation in the order of T and G in both the
DOC and the PrepC. Under specific circumstances, T can precede G in the DOC, as in:
Jan gaf het haar (lit. ‘John gave it her’); and G can precede T in the PrepC, as in: Jan
gaf aan zijn oude tante een boek (lit. ‘John gave to his old aunt a book’). This variable is
not taken into account in our study – we only consider the choice between DOC and
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(3)a. Jan gaf Marie een boek.
John gave Mary a book.
b. Jan gaf het boek aan Marie.
John gave the book to Mary.
In English and Dutch, some verbs occur exclusively in combination with the
DOC, others combine with the PrepC only, and yet others occur with both
constructions. Among the latter class, the alternating verbs, there are some that
have an overall preference for the DOC, others that prefer the PrepC, and yet
others that do not occur significantly more often with one or the other
construction (Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004; Colleman 2009).
Unlike English and Dutch, Polish is a case-marking language (i.e. it case-
marks all NPs, whereas English and Dutch only retain some case-marking in
the pronominal system). In the basic three-participant construction T occurs in
the accusative case and G in the dative, as shown in (4a). There is also a
prepositional construction available with some verbs, in which T retains
accusative marking but G is marked by one of several prepositions, as in (4b).8
The former construction will be referred to as the ACC-DAT construction; the
latter as the PrepC (like in English and Dutch). In Polish, as in English and
Dutch, there are verbs that occur exclusively with one or the other
constructions, and alternating verbs that occur with both.
(4)a. Przysyłają nam posłów.
send:3PL us:DAT representatives:ACC
‘They are sending us representatives.’
b. Przysyłają do nas posłów.
send:3PL to us:ACC represenatives:ACC
‘They are sending representatives to us.’
Finally, it should be noted that English and Dutch differ from Polish in that the
former two languages have a 3rd person singular pronoun referring to
inanimates: it and het, respectively. The 3rd person plural forms them and ze can
refer to either humans/animates or to inanimates, but Dutch hen/hun (3rd person
plural dative) is exclusively used for humans. In Dutch, the 3rd person
masculine pronoun hem (or the short form ‘m) can also be used to refer to
inanimates. Polish pronouns display no animacy-distinction; all 3rd person
pronouns can be used to refer to humans/animates and inanimates, though for
the latter demonstratives are often preferred.
Having introduced the basic options available in Dutch, English and Polish to
express three-participant events in general, we now turn to three-participant
events involving two human NAAs.
PrepC in Dutch, in parallel with English. See Van der Beek (2004) for a corpus-based
analysis of order variation in Dutch three-participant clauses.
8 The PrepC construction in Polish is not always considered to be an alternative trivalent
construction to the accusative-dative construction. Nonetheless, as discussed in Dąbrowska
(1997) and Rudzka-Ostyn (1996), it can clearly function as such.
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3. THREE-PARTICIPANT CONSTRUCTIONS WITH TWO HUMAN NON-AGENTIVE
ARGUMENTS IN DUTCH, ENGLISH, AND POLISH
3.1. General frequency and encoding of two human NAAs
Investigating the frequency of three-participant constructions with two
human NAAs in corpora that are not annotated for the category of animacy is
no straightforward matter, since there are many possible types of human Ts and
Gs, as well as possible combinations of these types. This is most obvious for
nominal T and G arguments. In the case of two human pronouns, however, the
number of possibilities is limited, and they can be systematically checked.
Starting with English, the total number of instances in the BNC of three-
participant constructions in which T and G are both human and pronominal is
280. Out of these, the overwhelming majority, 278 cases, are encoded by means
of the PrepC9. Some examples are given in (5a-e):
(5)a. If anyone protests refer them to me.
b. Leave her to us my lord.
c. So I gave her to him.
d. That would surely bind him to her forever.
e. It was I who first introduced him to her.
There were only two cases in the BNC of DOC and two human pronominal
NAAs. These appear in (6a-b):
(6)a. I’ll show you her anyway.
b. I couldn’t forgive you him.
It should be noted that the verbs in (5) and (6) belong to different classes:
some are alternating (such as give and show), others occur only with the PrepC
(bind, introduce), and forgive is a DOC-only verb. In the next sub-section we
will further investigate the influence of verb classes; suffice it here to say that
only in the case of an alternating verb can the use of a PrepC be viewed as a
direct morpho-syntactic reflex of a non-prototypical scenario.
In the Dutch corpus, which is 10 times smaller than the BNC, we found only
three instances of three-participant events with two pronominal, human NAAs,
all encoded by the PrepC, as shown in (7a-b); the third instance is the one given
in example (2) above10. In all three instances, the lexical verb belongs to the
PrepC- only class.
9 Note that for English, we performed lexical queries with the preposition to. As we will see
shortly, for Dutch we did not pre-specify the form of the preposition, mainly for lack of data.
For Polish, we considered a subset of prepositions, considered to be comparable to the dative
case marker (see note 11). The reader should bear in mind that these methodological choices
will affect the cross-linguistic comparability of our data to some extent.
10 Note that there are a number of instances of Dutch DOC constructions with two
pronominal NAAs, where T is a 3rd person pronoun that can have either a human or a
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(7)a. …alsof een grote kilte hem van haar scheidde
…as.if a great coldness him from her separated
‘as if a great coldness separated him from her’
b. Nadat ik hem van haar af had geduwd,
after I him from her off had pushed
‘After I had pushed him off her,’
In the Polish IPI PAN corpus we found 186 instances of three-participant events
with two pronominal, human NAAs in the ACC-DAT construction and 150
instances in the PrepC11. In terms of the actual person values of T and G, the
ACC-DAT constructions in Polish included 9 instances of clustering scenarios,
as illustrated in (8a) with an alternating verb, as well as 21 instances of crossing
scenarios, as in (8b), with a ACC-DAT-only verb12. Recall that neither type of
disharmonic scenario was expressed by a DOC in English.
(8)a. Nikt mi cię nie odbierze.
no.one me:DAT you:ACC NEG take.away:3SG:FUT
‘No one will take you away from me.’
b. Mnie mu polecił.
me:ACC him:DAT recommend
‘He recommended me to him.’
Interestingly, while the ACC-DAT construction is more frequent than the
PrepC with two human pronominal NAAs, a clear preference for the PrepC
shows up in Polish when considering only the cases in which T is a speech act
participant (1st or 2nd person; N=109): the PrepC is used in 77% of the relevant
cases, as opposed to 23% ACC-DAT constructions13.
To summarize, in this section we have identified instances of three-
participant constructions with two pronominal, human NAAs in English,
Dutch, and Polish, in order to get an impression of their actual discourse
frequency and their formal properties. As expected, we found that the frequency
of two human NAAs is very low in all three languages. However, when they do
occur, the two languages with object-based NAA-marking, English and Dutch,
use the PrepC (almost) categorically. In Polish however, which has role-based
marking, the PrepC is more frequent only in scenarios with 1st or 2nd person T.
These findings support the idea of a disambiguating function of the PrepC in
English and Dutch (cf. Kittilä 2006), while leaving room for frequency-based
explanations for the constructional distribution in Polish (cf. Haspelmath 2004).
non-human referent (and G has a human referent). In these cases, the context makes
clear that T in fact has a non-human referent.
11 Only trivalent constructions featuring the following prepositions were considered: do ‘to’, ku
‘to’ dla ‘for`, od ‘from’, o ‘about’ and u ‘at’. All of these are listed by Dąbrowska (1997) as
possible alternatives to the dative in certain contexts.
12 These figures do not distinguish between independent pronouns and clitics.
13 For more detailed corpus data on the 1st and 2nd person Themes in Polish (and
English), see Siewierska fc.
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So far we have discussed the distribution in the corpora of specific scenarios,
without special regard for the lexical verbs that these scenarios co-occur with.
As we mentioned before, however, construction choice is dependent on the
lexical class to which individual verbs belong. Moreover, the frequency of
occurrence of particular scenarios is influenced by verbal semantics. In what
follows, we will consider these lexical factors in more depth.
3.2. Frequency and encoding of two human NAAs with particular lexical verbs
As mentioned earlier, previous studies focus on trivalent predicates that occur
most frequently with an inanimate T and a human G. Nonetheless, it is often
suggested that there are verbs that are used more often with two human NAAs.
In order to evaluate this suggestion, in this section we consider the frequency of
co-occurrence of specific trivalent verbs with two human NAAs. In addition, we
consider lexical verb class as a factor determining the availability of
constructional choices.
Tables 1-3 provide data on the frequency of trivalent uses of a number of
lexical verbs in English, Dutch, and Polish, and the proportions of these uses
that involve two human NAAs. These data show that the frequency of three-
participant scenarios with two human NAAs indeed varies widely between
individual lexical verbs in each of the three languages. In fact, there are verbs
that seem to actually prefer two human NAAs, as they occur with this scenario
in the (large) majority of cases. Notably, however, these particular verbs are also
the ones with a lower overall frequency14.
There are some more noteworthy details about Tables 1-3. First, most of the
verbs that occur in Tables 2 and 3 (Dutch and Polish) are translational
equivalents of the verbs in Table 1 (English). However, there is no one-to-one
correspondence: there are no obvious translational equivalents of the English
verb endear in Dutch and Polish, and no obvious equivalent of English assign
and bear in Polish (but see Dutch toewijzen and baren). On the other hand, the
English verb give is represented by two distinct verbs in Polish: dać (‘give’) and
podarować (‘give as a present, grant’), and the English verb introduce is even
represented by three Polish verbs: przedstawić (‘introduce’), zaznajomić
(‘familiarize’), and poznać (‘acquaint’). The closest equivalent of introduce in
Dutch is voorstellen.15
Second, in each of the tables, the verbs are ordered according to their relative
frequency of co-occurrence with two human NAAs. It can be observed that
translational equivalents of verbs are not identically ordered in the three
14 cf. Haspelmath (2004), who makes this observation with reference to language change:
Even though non-prototypical scenarios may be more frequent with certain verbs, these
verbs are too infrequent in general to make it through the bottleneck of
grammaticalization and therefore they are expected not to counterbalance the overall
effect of the Ditransitive Topicality-Role Constraint.
15 Voorstellen also has the meaning ‘to propose’ (something to someone), and in fact
occurs most often in a reflexive construction, meaning ‘to imagine’.
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languages. This means that verbs from different languages with seemingly
similar meanings do not necessarily occur equally frequently with two human
NAAs. For example, the English verb bear has a much higher percentage of
two human NAAs (71%) than its translational equivalent in Dutch, baren (9%).
Finally, it should be noted that for verbs with a high absolute frequency of
three-participant uses, only a proportion of all instances has been considered.
This holds for the English and Dutch verbs give/geven, send/sturen,
bring/brengen, and show/laten zien. For all other verbs in English and Dutch,
and for all verbs in Polish we did consider all instances. The lower absolute
frequency of three-participant occurrences with the Polish verbs is due to object-
drop in this language, which leads to the exclusion of many constructions that
are semantically trivalent but do not have overtly expressed T and G arguments.
Lexical verb N of three-participant Proportion of 2
occurrences considered human NAAs
give 1004 0% (N=0)
show 1089 2% (N=18)
send 2054 3% (N=57)
present 637 3% (N=17)
assign 173 3% (N=5)
bring 2732 5% (N=136)
entrust 28 7% (N=2)
recommend 152 30% (N=45)
introduce 682 40% (N=275)
bear 51 71% (N=36)
endear 116 89% (N=103)
Table 1: Proportion of scenarios with two human NAAs within three-participant
occurrences of lexical verbs in English BNC (100 million words)
Lexical verb N of three-participant Proportion of 2
occurrences considered human NAAs
geven (give) 500 0.2% (N =1)
brengen (bring) 200 1,5% (N=3)
sturen (send) 500 2% (N=12)
laten zien (show) 25 8% (N =2)
baren (bear) 11 9% (N=1)
presenteren (present) 25 12% (N=3)
toevertrouwen (entrust) 39 17% (N=6)
toewijzen (assign) 18 22% (N=4)
aanbevelen (recommend) 14 29% (N=4)
voorstellen (introduce) 63 30% (N=19)
Table 2: Proportion of scenarios with two human NAAs within three-participant
occurrences of lexical verbs in Dutch CGN (10 million words)
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Lexical verb N of three-participant Proportion of 2
occurrences considered human NAAs
dać (give) 416 1% (N=5)
podarować (give as a present) 85 2% (N=2)
powierzyć (entrust) 93 3% (N=3)
przysylać (send) 121 4% (N=5)
pokazać (show) 196 6% (N=11)
polecić (recommend) 151 9% (N=14)
przedstawić (introduce) 204 9% (N=19)
zaprowadzić (bring, lead) 79 11% (N=9)
zaznajomić (familiarize) 19 21% (N=4)
poznać (acquaint) 9 100 % (N=9)
Table 3: Proportion of scenarios with two human NAAs within three-participant
occurrences of lexical verbs in Polish PELCRA CORPUS (14 million words)
Having established the frequency of co-occurrence of specific verbs with
scenarios involving two human NAAs, we may ask how this relates to the
constructions used to express these events.
In English, those verbs that occur most often with two human NAAs belong to the
class that occurs exclusively with the PrepC. Some examples are provided in (9a-e):
(9)a. Modigliani asked Lipchitz to introduce him to the small group of Jewish
artists.
b. But don’t present this girl to me.
c. And she has assigned them to me.
d. We sincerely hope you recommend us to your friends.
e. I have entrusted Hasan to a gentleman.
In Dutch, only toewijzen, the translational equivalent of assign, never occurs with
DOC in the corpus. Other verbs with a relatively high percentage of two human
NAAs belong to the alternating class, but they typically select the PrepC in
combination with two human NAAs. For instance, among the 63 instances of
voorstellen, there are 27 DOCs, but only one of those involves two human NAAs.
This single instance involves a passive construction, with the agent expressed in a
prepositional phrase, as shown in (10a). The other instances of voorstellen with two
human NAAs are all encoded with the PrePC, as in (10b), while the majority of
other, prototypical scenarios with voorstellen are encoded with the DOC, as in (10c):
(10)a. De heer des huizes werd me
the master the.GEN house:GEN became me
door Belita voorgesteld als vader Anselmus
by Belita introduced as father Anselmus
‘The master of the house was introduced to me by Belita as father
Anselmus.’
b. Mag ik u voorstellen aan mijn gesprekspartner
May I you introduce to my interlocutor
‘May I introduce you to my interlocutor.’
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via free access152 Anna Siewierska and Eva van Lier
c. Ik zal ‘t ‘m ‘ne keer voorstellen.
I will it him a time propose
‘I will propose it to him sometime.’
Similar patterns are found with the Dutch verbs aanbevelen (recommend),
presenteren (present), and toevertouwen (entrust): They are alternating verbs,
which in combination with two human NAAs typically select the PrepC, but
also incidentally occur in the DOC.
A weaker version of this pattern is attested, in both Dutch and English, with
(other) alternating verbs, such as show/laten zien, send/sturen, and bring/brengen,
which occur much less often with two human NAAs. Tables 4 (for English) and 5
(for Dutch) show that, while three-participant events with these verbs can be encoded
with either PrepC or DOC, the proportion of two human NAAs is consistently higher
among the PrepCs. In fact, with Dutch laten zien and brengen all cases of two
human NAAs are expressed by the PrepC.16
Verb Construction Overall proportion Frequency of two human
of construction NAAs per construction
show DOC 69% (N=748) 1,3 (N=10)
PrepC 31% (N=341) 2,3% (N=8)
send DOC 39% (N=792) 1.6% (N=13)
PrepC 61% (N=1262) 3,5% (N=44)
bring DOC 41% (N=1120) 2,4% (N=27)
PrepC 59% (N=1611) 6,7% (N=44)
Table 4: Alternating verbs and two human NAAs in English
Verb Construction Overall proportion Frequency of two human
of construction NAAs per construction
laten zien DOC 72% (N=18) 0% (N=0)
PrepC 28% (N =7) 7% (N=2)
sturen DOC 25% (N=126) 0.8% (N=1)
PrepC 75% (N=374) 3% (N=11)
brengen DOC 5% (N=9) 0% (N=2)
PrepC 95% (N=187) 1,5% (N=3)
Table 5: Alternating verbs and two human NAAs in Dutch
Finally, there are some DOC-only verbs in English, such as envy and refuse that
do occur with two human NAAs, but only very infrequently17. The English verb
bear is an exception: while it has two human NAAs in the great majority of
cases, it is in fact a DOC-only verb. Dutch baren belongs to the DOC-only class
as well, but, as we saw earlier, it has a much lower rate of two human NAAs.
16 This difference between English and Dutch may be (partly) due to the smaller
absolute numbers for Dutch.
17 For Dutch we have only one such example, with wensen (‘wish’), involving the idiomatic
expression iemand personeel wensen (‘to wish someone personnel’).
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via free accessDitransitive constructions with two human non-agentive arguments 153
In short, while English verbs that occur relatively often with two human
NAAs belong to the PrepC-only class, in Dutch they are mostly alternating, but
typically select the PrepC in combination with two human NAAs. Other
alternating verbs, in Dutch and English, also display a preference for the PrepC
in the relatively rare cases in which they occur with two human NAAs. In the
smaller Dutch corpus this preference comes close to being absolute.
Comparing the English and Dutch patterns with the Polish data, we see that
certain Polish verbs, such as przedstawić (‘introduce’) and polecić
(‘recommend’), belong to the class that occurs exclusively with the ACC-DAT
construction. However, these verbs have considerably lower proportions of two
human NAAs than their English and Dutch translational equivalents. On the
other hand, Polish has other verbs, such as zaznajomić (‘familiarize’) and
particularly poznać (‘acquaint’), which occur more often with two human
NAAs and which belong to the class that occurs exclusively with the PrepC.
Considering alternating verbs in Polish, we find supporting evidence for the
results reported in the previous sub-section: Unlike in English and Dutch,
Polish has no clear preference to encode scenarios with two human NAAs by
means of the PrepC. As can be seen in Table 6, although some alternating verbs
have a higher proportion of two human NAAs among their PrepCs, there are
others in which the ACC-DAT construction is used more often, sometimes even
to the exclusion of the PrepC.
Verb Construction Overall proportion Frequency of two human
of construction NAAs per construction
przyslać DAT-ACC 54% (N=65) 1,5% (N=1)
(send) PrepC 46% (N=56) 7,1% (N=4)
Zabrać DAT-ACC 33% (N=91) 18% (N=18)
(take away) PrepC 67% (N=184) 10% (N=19)
zeslać DAT-ACC 19% (N=10) 50% (N=5)
(send upon) PrepC 71 % (N-25) 0% (N=0)
Table 6: Alternating verbs and two human NAAs in Polish
The examples in (11a-b) further illustrate the lack of a correlation between the
PrepC and two human NAAs with Polish alternating verbs: In (11a) a DAT-
ACC construction encodes a scenario with two human NAAs, while in (11b) a
PrepC is used with an inanimate T and a human G. Both examples contain the
same lexical verb:
(11)a. Ostatnio zesłał mu pewnego franciszkanina.
recently sent:3SG he:DAT certain Franciscan.monk
‘Recently (God) sent him a Franciscan monk.’
b. po tylu nieszczęsciach, ktore na panią zesłał
after so.many unhappiness which on you sent:3SG
‘after all the disasters which (God) has sent upon you’
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via free access154 Anna Siewierska and Eva van Lier
In sum, while English and Dutch show an overall tendency, within and
across verbs and verb classes, to encode scenarios with two human NAAs by
means of the PrepC, no such pattern is discernable for Polish.
4. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have evaluated several observations offered in the literature
with respect to non-prototypical three-participant constructions, on the basis of
corpus data from three languages. Our data confirm that three-participant
scenarios in which both NAAs are human are (very) infrequent in discourse,
and that they tend to be encoded by more complex constructions than
prototypical scenarios with an inanimate T and a human G. In other words, the
high referential saliency shared by the two NAAs represents an unexpected and
as such salient situation, which is reflected in increased formal markedness.
On a more language-specific level, our results are also broadly in accordance with
claims and hypotheses advanced in earlier research. In particular, Haspelmath
(2004) mentions Polish as a language that violates the Ditransitive Topicality-Role
Constraint. Accordingly, we found no clear connection between the presence of two
human NAAs and the PrepC in Polish. Moreover, this finding is in line with Kittilä
(2006), who argues that disambiguating coding strategies are not required in
languages with a role-based strategy for NAA-marking.
However, our results suggest two refinements of existing accounts of three-
participant constructions. First, the Polish corpus data show that even in a language
with role-based marking, which has no absolute restriction on the encoding of non-
prototypical scenarios, it is possible to discern the effects of Ditransitive Topicality-
Role Constraint: In scenarios with a 1st or 2nd person T Polish was shown to display
a preference for the PrepC. This illustrates how a usage-based analysis, in
combination with a fine-grained set of referential variables can reveal saliency-effects
in languages and constructions that are not usually analyzed is such terms.
The second issue concerns the effects of lexical verbs. Our corpus data show
that in each of the three languages there are specific lexical verbs that occur
relatively frequently with two human NAAs, and some verbs were even found to
display a preference for this scenario. Moreover, we found differences between
verbs that appeared to be translational equivalents in the three languages, both
in terms of co-occurrence frequency with two human NAAs, and in terms of
construction choice. These results suggest a strong influence of specific lexical
verbs and verb classes. This lexical aspect merits further attention in future
research, not only in relation to three-participant constructions, but also as a
general factor that interacts with the effects of saliency, referring either to
specific referential properties or to non-prototypicality.
To conclude, our study shows how cross-linguistic corpus data can contribute to
our understanding of the interplay between the referential properties of arguments on
the one hand, and the lexical properties of verbs on the other hand, in determining
the frequency and expression of three-participant events with two human non-agents.
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via free accessDitransitive constructions with two human non-agentive arguments 155
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