On the Non-Existing Type of Clausal Ditransitives in Old English
On the Non-Existing Type of Clausal Ditransitives in Old English

Summary/Abstract: The paper is devoted to clausal ditransitive verbs with special focus on the Case of the NP argument. The term ‘clausal ditransitive’ will be used in the paper as defined in Allen (1995), i.e. to refer to verbs whose internal arguments are expressed by an NP and a clause. This type is to be distinguished from ‘ordinary ditransitives’, another term introduced by Allen (1995), denoting verbs whose both internal arguments are expressed by means of NPs.1 Clausal ditransitive verbs in Old English fall into two major types, depending on the Case of the NP object: (i) NP-ACC + clausal argument (ii) NP-DAT + clausal argument As NP objects of verbs in Old English could bear three Cases, i.e. ACC, DAT and GEN, an obvious question to be posed is whether there exists a third type of clausal ditransitive verbs, i.e.: (iii) NP-GEN + clausal argument The rest of the paper will be devoted to answering this question.

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