Ditransitive structures: the to- Dative

Abstract

Starting with Chomsky (1965) the English Dative alternation has received a considerable amount of attention given the two accounts which have emerged: a non-derivational account (Kayne 1984, Pesetsky 1995, Harley 2002, Bruening 2010, 2018, Hallman 2015 i.a.) and a derivational account (Larson 1988, Larson and Harada 2006, Ormazabal and Romero 2010, MacDonald 2015 i.a.). Starting from this discussion, I show that the dative alternation has a morpho-syntactic dimension which can be illustrated at the level of idiomatic expressions. Because idioms are considered fixed structures, the paper aims at investigating whether to-dative idioms can occur in both ditransitive syntactic frames. The investigation will show that idioms are fully compositional structures in line with Larson (2017) and they can occur in alternating ditransitive frames, contrary to what has been previously discussed.