Chapter published in:
Contrastive Studies in Verbal Valency
Edited by Lars Hellan, Andrej L. Malchukov and Michela Cennamo
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 237] 2017
► pp. 178–218

Exploring the domain of ditransitive constructions

Ditransitive splits and ditransitive alternations across languages

Following up on (Malchukov, Haspelmath & Comrie 2010), the paper provides a description of the lexical variation in the domain of ditransitive constructions. It has been shown that the variation is not random, but there are cross-linguistically valid preferences of certain verb meanings (verb classes) for certain alignments, which can be captured in the forms of hierarchies and semantic maps. The ditransitive semantic map has been shown to be able to capture extensions of ditransitive constructions across a wide range of languages, and to be applicable to languages of different structural profiles (making use of either flagging or indexing), as well as to different kinds of alternations, which are represented as areas of overlap in a universal semantic space.
Published online: 30 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.237.06mal
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