Q: I'm told

[Jacob Baltuch]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Cynthia Allen wrote:
 
>I have a whole chapter (chapter 9) in my 1995 Clarendon Press Book 'Case
>Marking and Reanalysis: Grammatical Relations from Old to Early Middle
>English'.  In a nutshell, the first convincing example is from 1375:
>Item as for the Parke she is a lowyd (=allowed) Every yere a dere.
>This is from the Award of Dower by Sir Thomas Blount
>
>This construction appears immediately after the fixing of the order of two
>bare NP objects, and my belief about what happened here is that the old
>indirect object became reanalysed as simply an object once this happened,
>making it available to passivization.
 
So any language in which accusative & dative collapse
together (both nouns and pronouns) and both direct and
indirect objects are bare NPs in certain constructions
would be liable to undergo this?
 
On the other hand I seem to remember that Japanese has
direct and indirect object take different postpositions
(-(w)o vs. -ni if I remember correctly) and yet has
indirect passives.