Toward a Ditransitive Prototype:The Gradience of English Ditransitives

Moon, Grace Ge-Soon. 2014. Toward a Ditransitive Prototype: The Gradienceof English Ditransitives. English Language and Linguistics 20.3, 115-134. Ditransitive constructions in English display a wide variation in acceptability judgments. Thepresent paper attempts to account for this variation within the framework of prototype theory. Specifically, it proposes a ditransitive prototype based on both the semantic features identified in previous research as relevant to prototypicaltransitivity and the properties that characterize the canonical ditransitive verb give.Arguing that the acceptability of ditransitive constructions is a reflex of theirpoximity to the proposed ditransitive prototype, the paper demonstrates that the"ditransitivity" of a given clause is determined by an interplay between the objectiveproperties of the clause itself and the speaker's subjective construal of the event described in the clause.